


Belle Arti

by Budinca



Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: A Generous Amount of Texting, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Art, Grantaire Rants, Italy, M/M, Museums, Painting, Quasi-traditional Cooking, Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-28
Updated: 2019-01-18
Packaged: 2019-09-29 04:59:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 28,304
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17196974
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Budinca/pseuds/Budinca
Summary: “You'd think they'd be more into living green, what with all art being just a recycled sludge of ideas from all who came before them.”“Originality is the myth of capitalism,” Enjolras said, avoiding the loose cobbles of the plaza and the sludge that lay therein. “Where are we going?”“Museum,” Grantaire said.Temporarily moving abroad certainly widens all horizons.Feat.an abundance of promenades, unsafe painting practices, subtle but lovingly placed mentions of tattoos, arguments over Italian pastry, debates over French cooking, enough European references to satisfy my heart, harmless but copious flirting, and maybe one cat.





	1. Grantaire

**Author's Note:**

> Wouldn't have wanted to disappear completely without trying my hand at Grantaire at least once. Most fun I've had in ages.  
> It's never stated, because I abhor being anything less than vague, but most of everything that's mentioned is based on Florence, more or less.
> 
> Incidentally, Grantaire's quote about ideas and recycling is also the most appropriate description of this entire story. Consider this an homage to the countless other stories I've read on this site on this particular tag. Welcome to _Les Mis Revisited_.

The phone rang four, verging on five, times – just enough for the higher notes of the Maple Leaf Rag to seep into the otherwise low atmospheric pressure – before Grantaire answered it.

“Yes, no, no, I have not yet uploaded last week’s recording, the world is not yet aflame with its passion for your freshly-shaven face, and no one has started a kickstarter in your honour. The moment I do, and it does, and they do, I’ll telegraph you a pigeon.”

“Ah, that’ll taste just like babushka's stew,” Courfeyrac said, on the other end. “No, I didn’t call about that.”

“It was on your mind.”

“It was _not_! This here is a really altruistic call!”

“Mhm,” Grantaire said. “I just posted it.”

“ _What_ ,” Courfeyrac, expectedly, wheezed.

“Joking, Mssr. Philanthropy.” It was getting hard to hold the phone up with his shoulder and keep mixing paints at the same time, but many said one ought to suffer for art. “What is it?”

One also ought to suffer for the hope of not being on the receiving end of forty-three more calls in the future, should one end the current one before the real subject was breached. Really, Grantaire ought to have more cramp ointment in the house, by now.

“You know, I shouldn’t even tell you anymore,” Courfeyrac huffed. He was the only person Grantaire knew who could verbally cross his arms. “Are you busy?”

“You know I’m not,” Grantaire said, one arm half-numbed by the act of adding yellow to some lackluster poplar leaves, the other holding a mixing plate concocted out of a tile that had been abandoned in the bathroom cupboard, and all of him surrounded by half-finished, high-priority commissions. But, you know, art is a hobby.

“Can you take Enj out of the house today?” Courfeyrac asked, quick enough that he ran the danger of choking on the spaces between words.

The painting-arm finally admitted defeat and slowly settled the brush on the nearest flat surface, before taking up the phone. “You mean, physically or…?”

“Just –” Courfeyrac stopped, and his verbal cues pinched the bridge of his nose. “Take him out of the house and make sure he stays there for at least, say, four-to-five hours? Ferre is at the institute, and I for once am going to class, and he’s been cooped up inside doing who-knows-what assignments  for like five days already.”

“Seems a bit late to act now,” Grantaire said, trying out a new strategy of balancing the palette on his thigh and drawing leaves left-handed.

“His record is seven,” Courfeyrac explained.

The new strategy was even shakier than the previous one. Enjolras was left-handed, he ought to be doing the nation a favour and be the one doing this right now, Grantaire thought. Then, on the same note, “So what do you want me to do? Steal an essay and flutter it in the air, see if he follows?”

“I mean…,” Courfeyrac seemed to be actually thinking about it. “No, I’m sure that wouldn’t work. I hope. Just don’t try it, and let me hold on to some sort of hope in the well-being of our friend’s state of mind? Say, just take him out somewhere.”

“Glorious plan,” Grantaire said. “How do I do that? Non-idle threats?”

“Yes, that might be it,” Courfeyrac agreed sombrely. “Listen, I’ve got to go, but keep us up to date, okay? Love you, bye!”

Grantaire was left staring blankly at his phone, not even deeming it worthy of an overtly raised eyebrow. _Well, there’s that_ , he told himself, then decided he’d go through at least a couple more poplar crowns before anything else.

 

> **Grantaire:** where r u
> 
> **Grantaire:** courf told me to threaten you in any way possible to get you outta the house today
> 
> **Grantaire:** so u know.
> 
> **Grantaire:** he’ll do that himself when he’s free.
> 
> **Grantaire:** lunch?
> 
> **Enjolras:** 15 mins.

 

It was drizzling cats and dogs at the time when Grantaire found himself in a blissfully-covered bus station in the approximate middle of Italy, keeping his hands warm with two coffees he’d acquired down the street and his soul warmer with the thought that at least now he had some leverage when asking Courfeyrac to bring him Thai take-out from the other side of town. The cold was not doing wonders to his already cramped-up articulations.

Enjolras arrived in a whirl of dark fabric, rain-frizzled hair and college-stress, then quickly insinuated himself inside Grantaire’s personal bus stop corner. Grantaire held up one of the cups of coffee with a smile. It was snatched out of his hands with all the grace of a mongoose.

“Thanks,” Enjolras said, leaning against the plastic wall of the station and catching his breath.

“Ran a marathon to get here?” Grantaire asked good-humoredly, knowing that he’d chosen the closest possible meeting place to Enjolras’s apartment.

“I forgot my bus pass,” Enjolras huffed, then took a hearty gulp of coffee. He grimaced only facially afterwards, unlike how he usually did it, with his whole body.

Grantaire took a sip of his own, also knowing that he’d poured both their shares of milk and sugar in it, and not regretting a single thing. “How did you know we’d need the bus?”

Enjolras frowned at him. “It’s pouring. _Where_ are we going?” Then he drank some more coffee, and frowned at that too. “This is disgusting, what did you order?”

“It’s drizzling,” Grantaire said, although both the cats and the dogs had doubled in size while they’d stood there. “Out in town. And I have no idea, but is that _any way_ to talk to the one who brought you coffee?”

This seemed to have struck the right chord, for Enjolras looked amusingly chastised. “Sorry, it’s this whole –”

“No worries,” Grantaire waved his moment of entertainment to a close. “Here,” he said, and passed him his own cup of coffee.

Enjolras did a juggling number to rival Grantaire’s from earlier in handling the first cup, his strangely-unused umbrella, and the second cup, now incoming, but he pulled through. “So, we _are_ taking the bus?”

“Yup,” Grantaire said, checking his watch, which he’d solely put on after months of disuse just so that he could count those fifteen minutes of waiting in a more stylish way.

Meanwhile, Enjolras tried the second caffeine specimen. This time, his expression took on the even more entertaining pallor of betrayal. “This – what did you do?”

Grantaire grinned, then took his coffee back. “Oh, look, our bus hath arrived!”

 

They rode the bus in a cloud of steam due mainly to the driver’s sudden need to try out the heating system before the worst of autumn was to come, and everybody's already moisty clothes. Then, they climbed out back into the drizzly weather that seemed to have followed them to the city centre. This time, Enjolras opened his umbrella.

“You'd think they'd be more into living green, what with all art being just a recycled sludge of ideas from all who came before them.”

“Originality is the myth of capitalism,” Enjolras said, avoiding the loose cobbles of the plaza and the sludge that lay therein. “Where are we going?”

“Museum,” Grantaire said, pointing with his coffee cup, then taking another gulp.

They'd done the undignified thing and poured the contents of each cup from one to the other at red lights and bus stops, until they both had the same variant of muddy sludge. It was marginally better than paint water, Grantaire had thought, as an expert, with more caffeine and less turpentine.

Beside him, Enjolras let out a rather perceptible sigh. Yet, he still kept the umbrella over both their heads, so Grantaire abstained from calling him out on it.

Memory suddenly nudged at his rain-addled brain. He took his phone out of his coat-pocket, and sent a text informing Courfeyrac of his progress, letting Enjolras lead them down the large, wobbly-floored plaza all on his own. A reply came back remarkably soon, and remarkably in character.

“Hold on a sec, would you?” Grantaire said, then flipped this phone around and took a picture of them with barely a glance. “Courf wanted to make sure I'm not just covering for you, while you still gather mold inside.”

Enjolras huffed, but only half-heartedly. He was looking at the approaching museum with an air of acceptant finality.

Grantaire looked back at his phone, where several more messages had appeared. “He says,” he intoned, “can you look any more excited?”

“Sure,” Enjolras said.

When Grantaire held up the phone once more, Enjolras joined his ecstatic grin with a tight-lipped, but very wide smile of his own, which only added to the effect of the rude gesture he was sending Courfeyrac.

“That's great,” Grantaire laughed. “It goes right on my wall of fame.”

“Hopefully not,” Enjolras said, drinking his coffee with almost a straight face.

Grantaire followed his example, discovering that exposure really did make the experience sweeter, and swayed with the unevenly cobbled walk Enjolras took them on. Around this time, he thought, demurely glancing at his watch, he would have been having breakfast. Time was really a strange construct.

His phone buzzed once more, this time with a photo of Courfeyrac making a very shaky heart with his hands at them. He wondered whether he knew the professor had come in, as seen in the background.

“Well, Courfeyrac will not be spying on us again anytime soon,” he concluded, then pocketed it once again. The rain picked up, but they were almost there, at this point. “What do you want to see? Flemish painters, Greek-ish sculptures, Caravaggio?”

“You know I don't know,” Enjolras said, matter-of-factly.

“Alright, but you know what happens when I’m told to improvise.”

“Did you seriously think a library card from Montpellier was going to work in a hotel in Bologna?” Enjolras hissed, now on the steps of the Museum of Art.

“Kill a guy for making an effort, will you? It was Bossuet’s idea, anyway,” Grantaire said, then waved himself off to the entrance. “Tickets.”

“I’ve got it,” Enjolras said, shaking the water off his umbrella in the view of a dozen smart pigeons, keeping out of the rain.

“Don't be ridiculous,” Grantaire said simply, but he did skip to the booth, just to make sure he would not be overtaken by others’ decidedly longer legs. “It’s my treat,” he explained, when Enjolras caught up with him.

“I thought you were asked to do it?”

“Okay, yeah, but I’ll be reimbursed for it,” he said, showing the tickets at the door. “One way or another,” he added, in a whisper.

Enjolras snorted, thanked the venerable lady at the door, and left his soaked umbrella in God-knows what forgotten place. “I wouldn’t mind paintings,” he added, after a moment.

“Too bad, I’ve already got us tickets for,” Grantaire made a show of looking at the already-checked tickets, “paintings.” He grinned. “Let’s see what will hold our attention for five hours.”

“Yeah,” Enjolras said, with an involuntary smile of his own, but then his brows drew together. “Wait, _five_?”

Grantaire was already slipping in the first room, however.

 

If anyone had expected this commissioned outing to be educational, however, they had been sorely mistaken. After all, Grantaire argued, the purpose was exactly the opposite, and he was the sole guide there. So, really, there was only one way this thing could go.

“Hey, hey, Enj, look at that guy,” Grantaire said, halfway through their first room. Once he got Enjolras’s attention, and directed it to the respective painting, he added, “That one looks like you before exams.”

Enjolras grimaced, proving his point exactly. “Must you remind me?”

“Yeah, no, sorry. Hey…” Grantaire said, already pulling out his phone. “Would you mind standing over there for me?”

“No,” Enjolras said, then seemed to reevaluate his words, and shook his head. “I mean, no, I won’t.”

“Please,” Grantaire closed his hands over his phone as if in prayer. “Help a starving artist out. It’s perfect.”

“It’s not,” Enjolras said, but he did go stand beside the painting, and even scrunched up his face again once Grantaire raised his phone, although that was probably more due to the situation than as a charitable act for his artistic career.

“Thank you ever so much,” Grantaire said, once he’d taken the picture. “It’s like having a set of improbable twins.”

Enjolras rolled his eyes, and took another mouthful of coffee. “When you initially said _lunch_ , I expected we’d simply get noodles from a corner shop, you know?”

Grantaire shushed him. “Shut up, and listen to the Flemish painters whisper to you.”

Then, he made good use of the museum’s Wi-Fi to upload the picture too, Enjolras and his pained painted twin, with the exact description he’d promised: _when exam stress gets to u_. He had a catalogue of these. He’d mostly started taking them when he’d compulsively visited the Louvre fifty times in one summer, a few years back, as an attempt not to sit and rot at home, but most of their friends found them funny, and several had been excited to be in them too, and who was Grantaire to undermine people’s honest wish to accompany him to art galleries?

“I like that one,” Enjolras suddenly said, pointing at something close by.

Grantaire followed his gaze, then waved it off. “Yeah, show me somebody who doesn’t like Vermeer and I’ll engage in my first street fight since 4th grade,” he said, putting his phone away once more. “Look at _this_ , though.”

Then, because he literally had no filter, stop, or notion of measure, Grantaire proceeded to hold a thirty-minute soliloquy on the path of white in traditional paintings, leading to the use of light and shadow, which inevitably led to Godfried Schalcken, by whom they were surrounded, and how, quote-unquote, _dope_ it was that he stuck with those crazy candles in most of his paintings that Grantaire himself would have loathed to paint, and did Enjolras know that somebody really, honest-to-goodness wrote a horror story inspired by this guy’s works, _in 1839_ , and it was this really bizarre tale of some guy who stayed to study too long, _Enjolras, you might learn something from this_ , and thus lost the love of his life to this ghastly Other Guy who had a lot of money, and they even made a movie out of it, although it wasn’t very good.

There were a couple more people lingering around them by the time Grantaire was done with his tirade, but, really, they should have minded their own business, Grantaire had been whispering the whole thing in French. Well, maybe at one point he hadn’t been whispering as much as talking in nearly-hushed tones while rolling the noise around with his hands, but he’d spoken solely French nonetheless.

His throat was dry, which wasn’t a good sign of the passage of time. Enjolras stared at him, coffee forgotten and probably cold in his hand, and his mouth slightly agape. Then, with a small gesture, he pointed at a different painting on the other side of the room.

“What about that one?”

Grantaire stared at him. Then, he downed more of his coffee, swallowed methodically, and turned to the work in question. The lingering ears followed them, but in a subtle way.

“Well, as for _that one_ ,” Grantaire said, and it was time for act two.

 

Four rooms and three tirades later, Grantaire finally deigned to check his watch. It provided him with information hitherto unknown and unguessed. “Yep. That makes three and a half hours done.”

Sitting beside him on one of the gallery’s strangely comfortable benches, after so much standing up, hands in his pockets and hair even more frizzled now that the rain had dried out of it, Enjolras was gazing at a large Bramer painting in front of them, no doubt following the white in it. At this, though, he glanced at Grantaire.

Grantaire glanced back, then raised both shoulders. “Lunch?” he tried.

Enjolras narrowed his eyes mistrustfully at him.

“For real, this time,” Grantaire promised. “There’s a place nearby, you might taste the best pasta of your life.”

“Wrong. Bahorel’s aunt makes the best pasta of all our lives,” Enjolras said.

Grantaire inclined his head in penitence. “True. But you might have the best pasta in Italy yet.”

“Debatable,” Enjolras persisted. “Have you tried the cafeteria?”

“Oh, God, I _know_ ,” Grantaire groaned, but in a subdued tone. “It’s so unfair, back in my day I had to cross four streets to get a passable sandwich, and here they are, feasting. Had I known, I’d have registered for this abroad programme when _I_ was in college.”

After a moment, Enjolras let out an amused huff. “ _Back in your day_ ,” he intoned.

“When you’re my age, you’ll understand. Nothing is as it used to be anymore,” Grantaire said, with all the wisdom their three-year difference gave him, then pushed himself to his feet. “So? Pasta, lunch, food, now?”

“Yes,” Enjolras sighed, then stood up with a wince too. “ _Then_ can I go home?”

Taking a page out of his book, Grantaire rolled his eyes. “Yes, _then_ you can go home, Enjolras,” he said. “And you’ll never see the remaining ten rooms and two floors’ worth of equally impressive works of art, and your life will be all that much bleaker for it.”

“Well, I don’t know,” Enjolras said, putting his coat back on. “We’re here for a year, that should be enough time.”

Grantaire sketched a smile, eyes following exit signs. “Yeah.” _Right,_  his mind supplied.


	2. Enjolras

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Google, let me search some Italian proverbs real quick.  
> No offence to any Erasmus grants, you are all heroes.

All his life, Enjolras had thought that all those people who went on an Erasmus programme and actually had fun during it were slackers, point blank. True, some of them were really good students, and didn’t seem to be lacking much knowledge upon their return, but nevertheless his decision stood firm – as most ideas formed at the age of six did. Now, waist-deep in his first semester abroad, reality seemed to have come to bite him in the nether regions. You wanted not to slack, now here’s your coursework, it seemed to say.

If he got one more musical email from Courfeyrac, or, worse now, Bahorel, he was going to fully erase his network identity and start going undercover as something probably like fiche_moilapaix@laposte.net. Then _he_ would start filling their inbox with junk. His phone buzzed itself off the desk and into the trashcan before he could even attempt to switch tabs.

 _Thank God it was mostly paper_ , although the remaining, undiagnosed 5% was still haunting, as he dug in for it.

> **Grantaire** : toc toc toc, it’s the weekly post
> 
> **Grantaire** : or, more likely, ur travelling therapist
> 
> **Grantaire** : that’s a bit much ok i didn’t pay that much for college

Sometimes, Enjolras was thankful that he’d learnt to understand all his friends’ speech habits through exposure alone, and that he didn’t need to appeal to Jehan to summarise every colloquial conversation to him anymore (Courfeyrac was never any use, an urban dictionary in and of himself). Other times, he still liked to play dumb, if only to see if luck was on his side and they were daunted by his perceived lack of social etiquette.

> **Enjolras** : what?
> 
> **Grantaire** : i got a part-time job at the loto
> 
> **Grantaire** : you’ve won a free walking tour

Luck was not on his side.

> **Grantaire** : meet u by the basilica in 20?
> 
> **Enjolras** : i’m busy
> 
> **Grantaire** : i wouldn’t be doing this otherwise.

Enjolras didn’t know why Grantaire was doing this _at all_  to be honest. He’d gone outside nearly every day for the past week (five times to class, four mixed with meetings, and twice grocery shopping, since Combeferre faked being ill, just to make sure Enjolras took mandatory study breaks, as if Enjolras himself wasn’t well aware of his ploy). There were breaks, then there were _breaks_ , and he knew when to take which. They were all an overly-agitated flock of mother-hens, and they’d chosen the wrong egg (that was he, Enjolras) to fuss over. Yet, he closed his laptop and picked up his coat nonetheless.

 

“I’m _fine_ ,” he said, before Grantaire could even fully raise his hand in greeting, thus making him swiftly stuff it back into his coat pockets. It was all too cold.

The answer to his well-thought-out statement was a lopsided grin, while the bells of the church behind them were announcing a weirdly-clocked and, if Enjolras’s ears weren’t playing tricks on him, rather out-of-tune mass. “I never said you weren’t. Shall we?”

Grantaire lead the way away from the church and into the damp, narrow, decidedly _beige_ streets that made up most of the city centre. France had always seemed greyer by comparison, in Enjolras’s eyes.

At the first corner, Grantaire handed him a pink lotto ticket. “Here you go, scratch it and see what you’ve got.”

Enjolras looked from it to him with a wary air. “You didn’t really get a job at the loto, did you?”

Grantaire laughed. “Of course not, come on. Give me the benefit of the doubt. And scratch that thing, I had to elbow my way through seven geriatrics to get it.”

Still keeping a hold of a corner of the wary air, Enjolras did as told. For a moment, it reminded him of childhood, and then, decidedly, of adulthood. “Try again,” he read.

“A classic,” Grantaire grinned, apparently unperturbed.

He walked the streets that opened like mildly-clogged veins before them like he knew where he was going. From their beige, and now orange, surroundings, Enjolras couldn’t even begin to guess. How many pages had he left unfinished back in the apartment, again?

Finally, curiosity won out. “How has Courf got you to do this again?”

“The same as usual,” Grantaire said. “A favour.” He glanced at Enjolras with no small amount of mischief. “Not that he knows it yet, I played on his famed altruism.”

“Ah, he’s still going on about that?”

“Unceasingly,” Grantaire nodded. Then, “Besides, I don’t mind, it’s not like I’ve got much to do, in between commissions. This way, at least, I trust you not to let me ramble all the way to Grosseto again. My feet killed me after that.”

“I haven’t even been to San Marino yet,” Enjolras said, buttoning his coat against the wind.

“Then you’re missing out,” Grantaire said, turning to him. “It’s a microstate, Enj, I thought you’d love that. What are you waiting for?”

Enjolras shrugged. They walked on several more streets, buildings slightly leaning over them now, restricting what light the perpetual autumn clouds gave, with him nodding every now and then as Grantaire recounted his top ten highlights of the visit he and Bahorel and Feuilly took to San Marino a month of so before. It was almost as ample as those talks at the gallery had been.

“Really, next time, I should tell Courfeyrac that the only way to get you to relax would be a four-star weekend trip,” was the conclusion.

Enjolras bit the inside of his cheek. “Did you even get your remuneration from him last time?”

“Of course,” Grantaire said. “ _And_ he brought me cake. But, alright, if we’re going to do this, you should act a bit more grumpy in the weeks to come, to _really_ sell it, you get me?”

“Groan more loudly at seven in the morning, throw out a few chairs before meetings?” Enjolras tried.

Grantaire’s eyes lit up, and he gestured even more wildly. “Right, yes! Maybe give him one of those looks you used to give me whenever I drew on your posters!”

“I have no idea what you mean,” Enjolras said.

Judging by the look he himself was getting, Grantaire did not buy it. Yet, his enthusiasm was unquenched. “Ohhh, what do you say? Should we _really_ do this, ask for more and more ridiculous bribes until we’re basically self-sufficient off his friendship alone, then elope and buy a beach house in Panama?”

Enjolras smiled. “I’ll consider it.” Then, once that was settled, “Where are we going again?”

“I have _no_ idea,” Grantaire said. “I’ve never been here.”

 

They ended up taking what seemed to be the longest roundabout way to circling the centre of town, which, Enjolras thought, about two hours in, when they stopped by a pastry shop to get afternoon brunch and to ask an old woman for instructions, was a sort of walking tour in itself.

“Never say I don’t deliver,” Gantaire said, once he’d shared this realisation with him, then tore off an entire half of Enjolras’s lobster tail and walked away with it.

“If you were hungry, we could have gone to a restaurant,” Enjolras tried, once his bewilderment faded off and they were walking side by side once more.

“Nonsense,” Grantaire said, hands full of pastry. “It’s such a beautiful day. Have half of my bombolone.”

It was so cloudy it had seemed to be evening since 7 am, when Enjolras had momentarily looked out the window to see whether the newspaper stand across the street was open.

“It’s a glorified beignet,” he said, when Grantaire passed the peace offering to him.

“Wrong, that’s a zeppola at best,” came the retort.

Enjolras shrugged, and ate nonetheless. He knew a lost fight when he saw one, and there was so little chance of him being in the right this time. He’d been raised on carrots pulled out from the garden and a thousand different recipes of bœuf bourguignon. This was not his strong suit.

“You know,” Grantaire said, when he was finished with Enjolras’s stolen pastry and retrieved what was left of the doughnut from Enjolras’s unprotesting hands, “if you’d told me this time last year that I’d be here, I would have laughed.”

“Me too,” Enjolras said.

Grantaire laughed. “Thanks.”

“I was talking about me.”

“You mean, you _haven’t_ had this planned since you were wearing a wee pair of red diapers?” Grantaire grinned at him.

Enjolras made a face, so he wouldn’t smile back. “I hardly ever know what I’m doing.”

“ _Ah_. I did wonder where your charm came from.”

Another face. “Likewise.”

Grantaire stared at him for a moment, before saying, carefully, “Oh well, you know what they say, _non tutte le ciambelle riescono col buco_.”

Then he toasted the remains of the doughnut at Enjolras, who by now was too busy laughing, holding on to his pastry like a lifeline while his shoulders shook.

“Trust me, _conosco i miei polli_ ,” Grantaire said, when he had almost regained his breath.

“Oh, my God,” Enjolras groaned, trying to reign his impression in, back, as Courfeyrac would say, to the usual gray spectrum of mild annoyance.

Grantaire glanced at him once more, when his eyes got very wide. “Wait,” he said, and actually stopped in the middle of the sidewalk, causing Enjolras to stumble right into his shoulder. When he’d stepped back, Grantaire already had his phone out and in the air. “We gotta let the people know,” he explained. “Also, you have powdered sugar on your cheek.”

Enjolras forcefully rubbed at his face, and by the time he was done, his phone was already buzzing in his pocket. “I’m sure no one thought I was dead.”

“Yes, but it’s so much more fun to see you alive,” Grantaire grinned, then put his phone away. “What now? Do we take a walk of shame back to where we started, or do you have anything else in mind?”

There were thirteen exact pages left unfinished back on his desk, he’d remembered. Yet, the day had its charm, storm clouds and all. Enjolras shrugged. “We could do another room at the gallery.”

Grantaire’s eyes widened so much that Enjolras was sure he was about to make a very terrible joke. Yet, too many seconds passed, and none came, and then his expression settled on a more restrained one.

“ _Alright_ ,” he said, carefully, then, also carefully, started walking again. “But just so you know, Feuilly and Bahorel have been away most of the day this week, and I’m severely undertalked.”

“Really? I hadn’t noticed.”

When Grantaire subsequently flipped him off, he only thought that was fair.

 

In their zeal, they’d forgotten to check the time, or the day, or anything, really, concerning the gallery, so it was well after they’d bought their tickets – Enjolras mildly wondering whether the situation asked for a monthly pass, at this rate – that they realised the museum was packed beyond recognition.

“This is a nightmare scenario,” Grantaire had said, on the doorstep of a room full of Spanish paintings and non-Spanish tourists, and then went ahead and let himself be swallowed by the crowd.

It would have been worse (mostly for Enjolras) had Grantaire not been wearing his coat. Said coat, which Grantaire and Jehan had found one week into their stay and which Grantaire had worn with a passion ever since it got too cold for sweatshirts, was a bright, rather loose, green-coloured thing that basically made Grantaire stand out in a crowd almost as much as Enjolras’s red one did. Which was why Enjolras had taken to solely wearing his dark coat when going out with him. And which was why Enjolras didn’t succumb to despair the moment he was left alone in a museum hallway, looking at a mass of bodies.

They met again on the other side of the room.

“Nightmare scenario,” Grantaire repeated, as if barely any time had passed, when in truth it had taken several minutes for them to pass the crowd. He gave his beanie a couple vigorous shakes, then put it back on his head. “So, hear me out: we climb up to the last floor, and pick whatever’s farthest from the entrance.”

“Great idea,” Enjolras said, then quickly carried them both to the stairway, when the mob seemed to drift in their direction.

 

“I feel like I’m on a diamond heist,” Grantaire said, when they arrived, panting, on the last floor. Enjolras looked up just in time to see him taking another picture, which was just as well. “Except I’m not Sandra Bullock and I haven’t done any fencing in literally three years and it _shows_.”

“They were very steep stairs,” Enjolras said, more for his own state of mind.

“Sure,” Grantaire said. “I’ll buy that. Now let’s see what awaits at the end of the rainbow. Prints. Sure, I can work with that. Enj, please keep on the lookout in case any big group comes after us.”

Enjolras hummed in some sort of vague agreement, finally looking at his phone after several hours of decidedly ignoring it. 

> **Grantaire** : [23102017_a.jpg]
> 
> **Grantaire** : we had to go through six tuscan dialects to ask for directions
> 
> **Jehan** : in conclusion, i think we’re all better off for the invention of rubber bands.
> 
> **Jehan** : aw, hey, r!! say hello to enj, he never bothered to call me back last time and i have daylight amnesia so obviously i forgot
> 
> **Joly** : Ah, it’s so nice to see the sky again, even if it’s through two screens and a camera.
> 
> **Bossuet** : (he’s getting better)
> 
> **Bossuet** : get an umbrella if it starts raining so you don’t end up like us!
> 
> **Bossuet** : also i stand by the rubber bands also
> 
> **Courfeyrac** : TAIRE!!!
> 
> **Courfeyrac** : gods im so glad i was gonna ask smb to check on our fearless leader (luv u enj)
> 
> **Courfeyrac** : but i literally woke up 12.5 mins ago
> 
> **Courfeyrac** : anyways dont stay out too long boys remember we have bingo night with jehan today
> 
> **Jehan** : courf you know it’s poetry
> 
> **Enjolras** : it’s a poetry reading, courfeyrac.
> 
> **Jehan** : haha jinx

Enjolras looked up from his phone to see Grantaire walking some way ahead, mildly gesturing as he praised what sounded like Bassano’s early work, although this mainly consisted of him pointing at various details and exclaiming _and look at that_. So, after one last glance, he hurried to catch up.

“I thought Courfeyrac asked you to check on me?” he asked, at the first break in his ongoing, verbal stream of consciousness.

When Grantaire looked confused, he shook his phone in the air a bit, then there was a longer pause while he read through it too.

“Just a moment,” Grantaire said, after that, and he began typing. Exactly one moment later, Enjolras’s phone vibrated once more.

> **Grantaire** : of course we haven’t forgotten, jehan i’ll bring you flowers!!!!!

“I was, what you might call, anticipating his requests,” Grantaire said, while Enjolras still somehow expected more to appear on his screen.

Now, he pocketed his phone, and shrugged, following Grantaire’s lead into a new room. “You could have said.”

“Nah, I needed the leverage,” Grantaire said, and at Enjolras’s ensuing silence, he looked back and grinned. “I felt you were more likely to humour me if I somehow implied Courf was involved again.”

“Why?”

Grantaire shrugged.

Enjolras thought for another while, then said, “If anything, I’m more likely to antagonize Courf with these things. He’s grotesquely unrelenting.”

Grantaire turned to face him with a hand on his heart. “Enjolras! Have some pity on a poor man’s heart, saying those things.”

Enjolras grinned. “He doesn’t have to know.”

“But _I_ do! Has my antagonism so let you down, that _his_ has surpassed it?”

Enjolras pretended to cogitate. “Let’s just say his is more prosaic.”

“ _Ah_.”

“He leans more on repetitions than on originality,” he said. “It’s cumbersome.”

“You _do_ have a way with words,” Grantaire said.

Enjolras finally had to laugh. “All I’m saying is, you could just ask me next time.”

“Sure,” Grantaire said, matter-of-factly, then turned away. “So, have I told you about my old pal Ugo da Carpi here? _Great_ times in college.”


	3. Grantaire

The funniest moment in his life, Grantaire thought, was the day they’d arrived in Italy and, mere minutes into the city, discovered that the only ones who were at least distantly fluent in the language were him and Enjolras. For some reason, it had never occured to any of them to ask before (Marius, who was a machine for languages and thus the first person everyone turned to the moment this came to light, had blanched and shamefully admitted he’d had a predilection towards the more Germanic variety so far). Everything that had followed afterwards was just some weird sort of afterglow left by the universe with that joke.

> **Cosette** : I’ll send you a recording of what this lady at the second-hand store told me, and I’d like you to pleaaaase listen to it a bit and at least give me an idea of whether I should still hope for some tulle skirts to come in stock? I’d ask Marius, but he’s SO FOCUSED on getting the language right that the accent alone would make him pull 3 all-nighters.
> 
> **Cosette** : [pleasehelp.mp3]
> 
> **Cosette** : Love you!!!! I hope you’re well?? Those last pictures you posted were really funny, I liked the one with Caravaggio.
> 
> **Grantaire** : she says she rly thinks a pleated skirt would look better on u and she’ll have 7 ready for u when u come back

Grantaire had learnt Italian because his mental health was such that it would fall into a literal pit of despair and bad decisions if not kept occupied at all possible times with the promise of some new, hilarious phrase in a language of his choice. Enjolras had learnt Italian unprovoked because that was just who he was as a person. Grantaire was more of a noun type of person. Enjolras was decidedly a verb one. Together, they drove any native nuts when they started talking over each other.

“Nooo, no way, listen,” Grantaire would occasionally say, when asked. “I learnt Italian because I’ve fallen hopelessly in love with that old woman shelling peas in _Call me by your name_ , and I only came here in the hopes of meeting her. Who knew Italy was not just one horny bike-ride across?”

To the universe’s – and, more importantly, Grantaire’s – surprise, Enjolras always snorted when he heard this tale.

> **Marius** : what does
> 
> **Marius** : [63000876_23.mp3]
> 
> **Marius** : this mean.

Grantaire raised an eyebrow at the screen and put his painting brush once more behind his ear, subsequently giving himself a pale-blue streak, alongside the orange, yellow, and green ones, respectively, that had been gathering there for the past couple of hours.

> **Grantaire** : it means ure a nerd
> 
> **Marius** : …
> 
> **Grantaire** : it means the neighbour’s donkey was found gallivanting on the other’s pasture, by the water and the peach trees. ur practice tests sure are weird
> 
> **Marius** : THANK YOU.
> 
> **Marius** : and tell me about it…

Really, Grantaire wondered why he didn’t take Bahorel’s advice to heart and start charging people for language practice. It had gone well enough for him when Cosette had signed him up to hold those volunteer painting courses for kids, the year before. It would, in any case, he thought, provide a surer source of income than his paintings did at the moment – he was still figuring out the Italian post system.

A cursory look at his palette told him he was yet again lacking ochre. So, humming so as to mask any joints creaking from his own ears, he bent down and rummaged through the wooden box he’d thrown all his supplies in, after Bahorel burdened both him and Feuilly with such a one, probably in an attempt to keep a sort of order around the living room. He’d watched too many artsy movies, in Grantaire’s opinion.

The search proved nearly fruitless, except for one last squirt of suspicious ochre from a long-forgotten tube. He ought to go by the _Belle Arti_ sometime soon.

When the phone buzzed again, he didn’t even bother anymore, just stuck the brush between his teeth and picked it up. Maybe Joly was right, and they _were_ slowly radiating themselves with this incessant use of technology.

> **Enjolras** : are you up? I’m close by.
> 
> **Grantaire** : guide yourself by the trail left by bahorel’s cologne

For a moment after he hit send, Grantaire stared in blank panic at the canvas before him; the apartment was a mess, Feuilly had thrown his half-finished fans on top of Grantaire’s splattered newspapers, and Bahorel had given up on cleaning after both of them last month, seeing how it all looked the same after two days. The windows were closed, to keep out the chill, but even if he opened them now, it would take hours for the smell of paint thinner to fade. Grantaire himself was dressed in the denim overalls that were so ragged not even Jehan had suggested donating them to those in need, and probably more than 70% of him was in some shape or form splattered with paint and, as it happened in old apartments found days before moving to a new country, dust.

Then, as swiftly as it came, the moment passed, and Grantaire let out a long, steadying breath. This was ridiculous, but old habits die hard, even mental ones. There was literally nothing that made this different than, say, if Marius were to come, asking for more details about his donkeys.

It was just that sometimes it was hard to remember.

When the doorbell rang like a dying woodpecker, Grantaire barely even attempted to rub the paint out of his hair. Then, he made a show of locking, then unlocking, then locking and unlocking his door again, in an attempt to disorient Enjolras in such a way that he wouldn’t realise Grantaire had forgotten to lock the door, yet again.

“Come on in, hold your breath until you reach the first window,” he said, cheerily, and let him come in, in a whirl of red so vivid that it made Grantaire instantly fear that the very air would spot it.

“I’ve breathed worse, when Feuilly still painted in those college basements,” Enjolras said, seemingly unbothered by the imminence of dirt as he hung his coat by the door.

So, taking his lead, Grantaire shrugged off part of his worry too, and went back to the make-up studio of their living room. “It wouldn’t have got this bad, but I’ve been putting this off for literal ages, and I thought if I don’t kick my own ass into finishing it now, I never will,” he explained and gestured at the large canvas sitting by the window.

Enjolras around before looking at it. “I would have asked if you were busy, but I know you hate admitting it,” he said.

“It’s the secret of the trade,” Grantaire joked, but only half-heartedly. Against his better judgement, he was weirdly touched. Except there was nothing weird about it, when one thought about it. “Sup,” he therefore said, to distract his mind from it, and took a seat with his back to the easel. “What brings you round these parts? There’re hardly any coffee houses nearby.”

Enjolras looked at him, and narrowed his eyes.

“You’re yearning for a coffee right now, aren’t you?” Grantaire grinned.

“No,” Enjolras said, but refused to take a seat yet. “Fine, yes. If you show me where to find it, I can make some myself.”

“Coffee’s in the third, crooked, vaguely pistacchio drawer in the kitchen, milk is not in the fridge, but powdered in a bowl beside the coffee, and there’s no more sugar, because Bahorel had a craving for biscuits last night,” Grantaire said, then counted to twenty after Enjolras proceeded to disappear into the kitchen, and followed him there. “Let me?”

“I’ve got it,” Enjolras said, and, true to his word, he did seem to have it, for he had already gathered all things around him and put water to boil. “I’ll bring you some when it’s done, don’t let me disturb you while you’re working.”

“Not a chance,” Grantaire said, watching him handle the retro tin can of coffee. “I want a five-star rating on Airbnb. You didn’t answer, by the way.”

“I was taking a walk.”

Grantaire let the ensuing silence speak for itself.

“Fine. I left early this morning, tried for two hours to find a working printer, went to class, went to a foreign students meeting, had a… disagreement with some of them, tried to print my papers again, took the wrong bus, then walked the remaining four stops here,” Enjolras elaborated, angrily stirring the kettle.

“Hmm,” Grantaire said, thoughtfully, and leant against the doorframe, one hand to his chin. “Did you hit anyone in the shin with a binder this time?”

“That was 9th grade!” Enjolras waved his hands at him.

“So, you did, or…?”

“No, Christ,” Enjolras said. “There was nothing to put in it, so I didn’t have one.”

Even he had trouble keeping his smile in by the end of that sentence. Grantaire laughed freely, then took the cup of coffee from him and kept sniggering until they were both back in the living room.

“I won’t stay long,” Enjolras said, although they’d literally just sat on the couch. “I didn’t really think I’d get all the way here.”

“I’ve _been_ told I was one of the most notorious tourist traps on the way to Lapland,” Grantaire said, making him roll his eyes. “But don’t sweat it, you’re not interrupting anything.”

Enjolras’s eyes trailed from him to the wet-looking painting on the easel, then at the one propped by the window, and then the one laid on a nightstand, and finally back to him. A perfectly raised eyebrow (Grantaire ought to know, since in this, too, he was an expert).

Yet, he shrugged. “The paint will be there when I’m back.”

“When was the last time you turned someone away?” Enjolras chose, out of the blue, to persist.

“The last time Courfeyrac came to deplore my own love life to myself,” Grantaire deadpanned.

“Which was…?” Enjolras raised both eyebrows now, and when Grantaire tried to give him as scathing a look as he himself had been given in the past, he hid his smile in his coffee mug.

Yet, now that he thought about it, “Like two years ago, when he visited me in Montpellier for Easter.”

“You kicked him out when he was there to stay with you?”

Grantaire waved one arm in a broad arch, “He lived. I only sent him to wander the streets for a few hours while I finished something for his mother.”

Enjolras was once again looking at the paintings. “When are these due?”

It was like turning in late homework in middle school all over again. “What are you, a teacher? When they’re done. What day is today?”

“The twenty-first.”

Grantaire suddenly put his cup down and slithered back to his easel. “Okay, fine, I’m in trouble then.”

“Can I help?” Enjolras asked, with a very fetching amount of hesitance.

It was, also, a far more adequate amount than the one Grantaire was feeling at the moment, faced with the fact he’d been living in the nineteenth of the month for like four days now. Hands already armed with brushes and bathroom tile, he turned back to him.

“If I show you exactly where to put spots of white, can you do it?” he asked.

“No.” There was hardly any hesitation here.

Grantaire nodded, then kept on nodding. “Great start, always know your limits. Now, I’ll need you to do it anyway, because I just realised _that one_ had to be done _and_ dried yesterday.” He pointed at the one by the window.

“How do you live like this?”

“Same as you, actually,” he said, frantically adding fuchsia lines along broadly geometric shapes. “Only, I don’t start my final assignments one third of the semester in.”

“How am I still the one being judged in this situation,” he heard Enjolras mutter behind him, before pulling a chair out of the few kilograms of splattered newspapers Grantaire and Feuilly had been throwing in the least used corner of the room. “Alright, show me what to do, but I’m only touching this if you swear you can fix whatever I mess up.”

As fast as he’d sat down, Grantaire sprang out of the chair and went to gather a second set of supplies. “It’s modern art, Enj, some of us pray for honest mistakes to flaunt in our works,” he said, laying those beside him.

Enjolras looked up at him. “You’re full of shit, you know that?”

Grantaire glanced back, and grinned. “I know. Now let me find the apron Bahorel got for Feuilly and proceeded to only wear himself ever since, your shirt is awfully close to white.”

“It’s fine.” But he did start rolling his sleeves up in such a messy fashion that Grantaire’s heart as someone who knew how to iron shrivelled a bit. “You said I only have to do white, anyway.”

“Yeah, but look around,” Grantaire said, grandly showcasing the room, before going behind him and draping the lifesaving apron around his neck. “Spots have a life of their own in here.”

“It’s just clothes.”

“Say that to your mamma,” Grantaire said, then leaned down, one arm around Enjolras’s shoulders, and analysed the state of the painting. Once the situation got more dimensions that _holy shit, this is so overdue already, I’m going to die penniless and alone in a ditch_ , he cleaned his throat and put a brush in Enjolras’s hand. “Okay, so I want you to put very fine spots here, here, here, and here, then here, here...”

And so on, until Enjolras, a picture of comically exaggerated gravity, touched the brush to the canvas six consecutive times without irreversibly damaging it. It seemed like they would all (people and paintings) get out of this alive.

 

“I guess this wasn’t how you expected your afternoon to go,” Grantaire said, maybe an hour and a half later, when the chances of him catching up with work started to seem almost positive.

Around three quarters of an hour in, even Enjolras’s shoulders had relaxed a bit, but to Grantaire it still seemed as surreal as anything to see him, in his checkered button-down and an apron with _Ooh la la!_ written in saucy letters on it,  holding three brushes and a saucer/palette and appearing to know what to do with them.

“I’ve learnt not to hold any expectations, when it comes to this,” Enjolras said now.

Grantaire wondered what _this_ was. “Well,” he said, swallowing his thoughts like dry pills, “thank you, in any case. I would have been a dead man walking if left to have my own way with these. I’ll pay you back somehow.”

“I thought we were eloping?” Enjolras said, and when Grantaire glanced at him, he smiled.

Truly, Grantaire was glad he was not the same he’d been two years before. Because, then, he wouldn’t have been able to say, “Right you are, my bad. I’ll add another star to the cruise ship.”

He fiddled with the landscape for as long as he could without starting to feel a Pointillist movement starting to take root in his right side of the brain, and then he stood back, putting his brushes in the tin can of water with an air of finality.

After a moment, Enjolras, likewise, leaned back. “Now what?”

“ _Now_ ,” Grantaire said, swirling his bundle of sticks in paint water, “we wait.” He grinned at Enjolras. “In my profession, every so often, you do end up watching paint dry.”

Enjolras snorted, but followed his cue and set his own brush down. It was a miracle of modernity or maybe just of Grantaire’s life in general that what had been a gamble had turned out to actually work. For all his insistence about not knowing anything about the fine arts, Enjolras had actually managed to take his task to completion quite flawlessly. And he wasn’t, as Grantaire well knew, that good at taking instructions, so really, there must have been some good divinity watching them from above.

It was when he stopped to rub some feeling back into his cramping hand that Enjolras looked at him and said, “Do you want to take a break and get something to eat?”

“If you can order. My phone is dead and probably in the laundry basket.”

“Actually,” Enjolras said. “I saw a place a few blocks down. I was about to suggest it when I first came in, but then I forgot.”

Pressing in between his knuckles, Grantaire snorted. “You wanted to take me out on the streets?”

“Yes?” Enjolras frowned.

Grantaire grinned. “Like this?”

And when the frown didn’t falter, he spread his arms, to offer a better view of his paint-bespattered, threadbare overalls and shirt. Hell, even his tattoos were buried under so many splatters that not even he knew what was paint and what was ink by this point.

He stared at Enjolras. “Looking like a postmodern, pansexual Pollock impression?”

“Ah,” Enjolras said, and there was honest, if mild, surprise on his face. “I hadn’t noticed.”

“You hadn’t –” Grantaire started, before starting to shake with laughter.

On the background of his glee, there was Enjolras making some irritated sounds, but who cared, when Grantaire was already doubled over and holding onto his stomach?

“I don’t –” Enjolras was then saying, seeming at a loss for words, “– pay attention.”

“Ouch,” Grantaire managed to say, between bursts of laughter.

“That’s not what I meant!” Enjolras struggled, which only made the situation seem even funnier to Grantaire’s probably sleep- (but surely laugh-) deprived mind. “It’s just that I usually look at your _face_.”

Grantaire wheezed. “There’s paint _on_ my face!”

“There’s always paint on your face!” Enjolras nearly yelled, and Grantaire heard it break into a laugh halfway through. “You’re like a hyperactive, over-qualified kindergartner!”

Grantaire was going to just go and roll on the floor until he literally died of laughter. Well, at least, he thought, Enjolras sounded like he would follow him right through. There were so many worse ways to go.

“Okay, okay, back on track,” Grantaire said, massaging his aching cheeks. “We can definitely go get food. Just let me change into something that doesn’t make me look like a Bricolage mascot.”

“What do I do with these?” Enjolras asked, mildly breathless, pointing at the brushes.

Grantaire shrugged, then set his articulations back in place once he got to his feet. “Just leave them in the paint thinner, they’ll be there when we come back.” He stopped and looked at Enjolras. “I mean, if you want to. God knows, you don’t have to.”

Yet, Enjolras shrugged. “I have a free evening.”

“And is that the truth or a self-destructive way of getting back at me for not admitting I have “work” to do?”

Enjolras gave him the same tight smile he gave Courfeyrac when he pissed him off. “It’s “the truth”,” he said, mimicking Grantaire’s air quotation back at him.

It took the better part of fifteen minutes for Grantaire to actually become presentable, which was both much longer and shorter than he sometimes needed. Yet, whereas clothes came easily – thanks to Bahorel’s insistence that they at least all systematically did laundry together – the very act of scrubbing acrylics out of skin was nothing short of plastic surgery. Jehan had taught him this trick of painting his nails in accordance to the palette of the painting he was most focused on at the moment, so that, if anything, wayward paint would not stick out quite so much, but that required time, and Grantaire – in his decidedly non-busy state – had drastically lacked that lately.

So, most of the time he kept Enjolras waiting was spent fiercely rubbing his hands, face and, now, hair, in a not-quite futile attempt to take the worst of the paint off. Really, he used to be less messy with these things in college. Then again, he’d also painted decidedly less at the time (rather counter-productive, but sometimes that was just how depression worked).

“There was paint _in my hair_ ,” he said, when he’d reemerged from the bathroom, a changed man. “Are you sure you don’t need glasses? Or are you afraid people won’t be able to see your steely, righteous stare due to the fire of justice reflecting in them?”

“I don’t need glasses,” Enjolras said, offering Grantaire his coat. Together, they looked like overgrown christmas elves, in their respective colours.

“You sure? You’d be like a taller, less-groomed version of Elle Woods,” Grantaire grinned, putting his beanie on top of his partially-damp hair.

Enjolras frowned at him, although now Grantaire thought that it looked more like he was struggling to see, so maybe he _was_ onto something, then shifted his hand and rubbed Grantaire’s cheekbone with far more force than necessary, thumb coming away with a tint of pale green.

“I’m sure,” he said, and an internal, younger part of Grantaire sighed, before he followed him out the door.

 

Only a part of them were actually there academically. Courfeyrac, Marius and Enjolras, taking wildly different approaches to the same degree, had initially come up with the idea – well, it had been Courfeyrac who first begged Enjolras not to leave him alone, and then Combeferre who took the lead and broke the news to all the rest. Combeferre, in turn, was also in some way academically there, although in a mildly different way, as something precursory to his teaching period (Grantaire could not wait for that to start; he’d more or less jokingly said he would enroll in college again just to be able to attend Ferre’s courses).

Then, there were Bossuet, Joly and Musichetta, who had literally parted the seas to be there. Musichetta also with school, Bossuet in a sort of nondescript internship, and Joly taking a year off med school to calm his nerves and his stress-induced illnesses. Cosette was the one in a million event of a kid asking for a year off to travel and actually getting it. Jehan had been making plans to go backpacking around Europe anyway, possibly with some working on farms involved.

Feuilly and Grantaire had been sharing rent in France since art school, and when the mental question arose, more and more of their friends suddenly making plans to leave, Feuilly had just noted one night to Grantaire that _rent was rent, no matter the language in which one asked for it._  Bahorel had been one of the last to decide to come, having had some other prospects, but a couple weeks into their stay, he just turned up at their door in Italy, and that was that.

All in all, it had seemed impossible, and yet here they were. Grantaire found himself missing Eponine and Gavroche on a nightly basis. He kept at all times an eye out for cheap tickets for them to visit.

Also, despite all this, when they met, they still sometimes did it on college grounds, like they’d grown accustomed to. Grantaire was pretty sure nobody really knew which of them were actually students there, and that they were seen mostly as that giant mass of people seemingly speaking three languages at the same time.

“Sorry, so…” Feuilly started, then broke off to hide a yawn so long Grantaire looked around for the nearest flat surface to let him sleep on. “What – what exactly is the first plan of action?”

For all Grantaire knew, Courfeyrac recounted it all to them. Having finally found a pencil in his bag, he’d zoned out almost on instinct, and only tuned back in when Courfeyrac clapped, then smiled brightly at all of them. “Fun stuff! It’s like child’s play, after that big conference in Paris last year!”

“It’s paperwork, it might take longer,” Musichetta said, not looking up from her surely unrelated papers.

“We could chant,” Jehan offered.

“No,” Enjolras chose in to put in his two pence, already looking like he wanted to become one with the table he was sitting at.

Grantaire assessed the situation as normal, and turned to his phone.

> **Grantaire** : there’s nothing like a lunch-turned-meeting to make one feel like home
> 
> **Grantaire** : ferre gives us one look over his glasses and it’s as if i can hear the bells of sainte chapelle ringing in the distance
> 
> **Eponine** : lol
> 
> **Grantaire** : and how’s your work day going?
> 
> **Eponine** : fine if only for getting paid tmrr so i can buy a new damn skillet
> 
> **Grantaire** : my respect for gav being able to completely melt one
> 
> **Eponine** : turn it to cinders more like anyway shut it u dont have to live with the smell
> 
> **Eponine** : shit i gotta go
> 
> **Grantaire** : call you tonight?
> 
> **Eponine** : i call
> 
> **Eponine** : take care of those idiots

“‘Taireeee,” came the drawl from not too far away.

“That’s not my name.”

“Of course it is, I call you that all the time,” Courfeyrac countered, still all sugary smiles and leaning over the table corner Grantaire was presently occupying.

“Exactly,” he said, and looked up. “What?”

“How are the graphics for the website coming along?”

Grantaire pulled a different sheet of scribbled paper out of his bag and wordlessly held it up to him, and then another.

“Oh!” Courfeyrac brightened somehow even more. “That looks good! We gotta show the others too.”

Let it be known that Grantaire, at that moment, _had_ tried to offer the sheet to him. It was just that Courfeyrac always had other outcomes and journeys in mind. So Grantaire’s yelp the moment Courfeyrac rounded the table, took hold of the back of his chair, and wheeled him along (Grantaire might have stolen it from an open classroom, when the opportunity arose), papers and all, was absolutely explainable.

“Everyone, come look at our new concept album covers,” Courfeyrac said, and Grantaire’s chair came to a stop somewhere between Combeferre and Musichetta.

“I thought you were more focused on losing your scarce enough free time with paperwork everybody had been fine not doing before we graced these halls?” he said, in a poor attempt to stave off attention while his poorly-induced vertigo passed.

“You say that as if you’re not here with us this very moment,” Musichetta said, ruffling his hair through his beanie and taking one paper out of his hands. “Oh, these are really good, we could have these on posters and suchlike too!”

“I have separate ones for that,” Grantaire felt the need to add, but in a mumble, so as not to seem as big a nerd as he was feeling.

It was all for nought though.

“ _Really_?” Joly’s eyes widened. “Spill!”

And Grantaire did. All the contents of his bag, thankfully all sketched designs and just a few pencils, flooded the tabletop, and gathered everyone’s attention. He felt like he was back in middle school, and the only kid that drew. Now, _that_ was valuable life experience, he thought.

Across the table from him, Enjolras was still frowning deeply at a piece of paperwork. When one page from the design portfolio touched it, he simply pushed it away by a few centimetres. Grantaire evaluated his mind to see whether he’d be able to resist it, then decided he most surely wouldn’t, and knocked his foot into Enjolras’s.

It made him look up, although with a couple seconds of lag. “What is it?”

Grantaire nodded at the sheets before him. “What’s got your goldie-locks in a twist?”

Enjolras pulled his hand out of his hair, where it had, to Grantaire’s credit, been slowly twisting it into knots. “It’s just that when I went to the principal, he seemed to write me off as this private-school guy wanting to appear magnanimous, and barely even listened to me.”

“To be fair,” Courfeyrac said, demonstrating once again his God-given multi-hearing abilities, “he did that to me too, and I wore sandals well into October.”

“I’m pretty sure it was because you were eating a lollipop while talking to him,” Combeferre said mildly, with a friendly smile.

Courfeyrac frowned at him. “I was trying to remind him of his long-lost youth!”

“Send some other kid like a messenger from the God of social issues?” Grantaire tried.

Enjolras made an unimpressed face at him. “I thought all gods were by definition dealing with social issues?”

Courfeyrac laughed. “We would,” he said, “but Enj here has some trouble letting go of his attributions.”

“I would just feel better if I were there to explain it to him correctly,” Enjolras said, raising his hands.

Courfeyrac clapped each of them in turn. “Then let’s make you look like a _real_ radical. Ferre, remember Enj in high school?”

“Like Joan of Arc with a headband,” Combeferre supplied, instantly.

A few seats away, Bossuet snorted. “You wore a headband?”

“He still does, sometimes, you should see him doing spring cleaning,” Courfeyrac said, gleefully. “Now, Enj, you don’t happen to have it on you right now, or…?”

Enjolras, who had been glaring at him for the better part of a minute, now glared even harder, until suddenly his expression loosened in wonder. “Oh, no, I got it.”

However, _it_ must have been an idea, and not the notorious headband, much to the detriment of Grantaire’s amusement, because the next moment, Enjolras got up and shed his cardigan in the process. Then, left in a thin button-down in the middle of a rather chilly hall, he looked at Grantaire.

“Can I borrow your hoodie?”

Twenty-five years of living on this Earth were the only things that made Grantaire stop gaping and say, simply, “I’m hurt.”

“It was your idea,” Enjolras countered.

“It definitely wasn’t, and I don’t dress like a radical,” Grantaire said, half-laughing.

Enjolras frowned at him, crossing his arms either in an attempt to look more disappointed or against the cold. Evidence was inconclusive.

Yet, everyone there, including himself, knew what his response was going to be, so why prolong his suffering? “ _Fine_ ,” Grantaire said, and made a show of taking off his hoodie as painfully as possible.

Enjolras took it right off his shoulders, midway through, and then Grantaire’s lap was graced with the private-schooly view of Enjolras’s cardigan. For a moment, he wondered whether he was expected to put it on, but then he decided that he might as well ride the train until the last stop, and put it on just as painstakingly slow as he’d taken the other off.

“This is modern prince and the pauper, right here,” he added, when the last sleeve was through.

“You know, now that this brings out your eyes, I can finally see it on you that you finished college,” Courfeyrac told him.

“Thanks,” Grantaire narrowed his eyes at him.

“Enj, do we need to teach you jargon?” Jehan asked, from somewhere.

Enjolras had been too focused on arranging the hoodie over his shirt to actually pay attention, from the looks of it, for at the mention of his name he just frowned. “What? No. I’ll be right back, anyway.”

Yet, instead of going, he cast one more look at Grantaire, then carefully pulled the beanie off his head. Funnily enough, it didn’t look much different on him, curly hair and all, but it was the culture shock that threw Grantaire off the most. And, it seemed, he wasn’t the only one.

“Wow, Enj, you look like an art student,” Musichetta said, half-turned in her chair.

“I resent that,” Grantaire said. “Also, can I please return now to my quiet place beside Bahorel, where nobody is stealing my clothes to get away from authorities?”

“Sure,” Enjolras said, seconds before taking hold of Grantaire’s chair and wheeling him back to the other end of the table. This time, too, Grantaire yelped. He’d never been one for roller coaster rides.

“There goes my uneaten lunch,” he said, once the world was still again.

In front of him, Bahorel was laughing, currently looking over two poster designs that had made their way to him. It was these that Enjolras finally seemed to see, for he then leaned around Grantaire to take a look at them, and then at the ones closest by.

“These are very good,” he said.

“Yeah, I sell them by the tons of graphite I use,” Grantaire said.

“No, you don’t, I’ve looked at your website,” Enjolras said, holding several sheets now, the sleeves of Grantaire’s hoodie only slightly shorter on him than they were on Grantaire. It was a strange sight indeed, like seeing your favourite childhood toy in a shop window, three countries away.

“Well, duh,” he said, for some reason. Then, “You’ve looked at my website?”

Enjolras blinked at him. “Yes?”

Grantaire found himself grinning. “Fancy a portrait?”

A small smile pushed at the corners of Enjolras’s mouth. “Maybe some of those Art Nouveau sets you had there.”

“ _Aw_ , you remembered a term!” he cooed. “I’ll make you a newbie discount.”

“Thanks,” Enjolras said, smile more evident, then picked up his own paperwork once more. “Alright, wish me luck.”

They all more or less watched him leave, like parents keeping a distant, but amusedly intrigued eye on their excitable children at the playground. Maybe Enjolras _was_ right about them mothering him too much, Grantaire thought, but then decided that it was much more fun to keep at it.

“He doesn’t stand a chance,” Joly said, in a grave whisper.

Yet, a quarter of an hour later, when Enjolras returned, he was brandishing the signed papers with a proud grin and a defiant look at their various states of disbelief.


	4. Enjolras

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I've been told I make cooking scenes seem too easy, but come on, people, they're just glorified stews, how hard can they be to make?  
> That being said, never make me follow a recipe, I will burn like a woman of questionable character tied in the proximity of some bales of hay.

It all started when Courfeyrac was in one of his blue moods – and these everyone could feel, like drops in the atmosphere – and spent the better part of an evening nursing a half-congealed cup of hot chocolate. Combeferre had been making some vague attempts at making him liven up (i.e. softly kicking his shin underneath the table), but Enjolras had been sort of waiting for the source and solution to make themselves know, all while going on with his own work.

Then, like the oracle at the bottom of a volcano, Courfeyrac spoke.

“I miss my mom’s cooking,” he sighed, turning the cup this way and that. “Food here is good enough, but I miss having wine splashed on everything and using five cups of cream for almost everything. I miss grand-mère’s coq au vin and potatoes and all. Do you think I can get them to mail them to me in a tupperware?”

“Only if you don’t intend to eat it,” Combeferre said.

“Ferre, at this rate, I’d be glad to merely sleep with it in my bed.”

“Please, don’t,” Enjolras said, and later than night went and looked through his stash of recipes.

 

Perhaps, however, it had been wrong to tell Courfeyrac the very next day what he was attempting, for in doing so he’d set in motion a long and winded process of him spreading the information to all their friends, and thus organising something that, while not technically a party, still resembled one marvellously well. It had to be hosted at Musichetta, Joly and Bossuet’s place, however, since theirs was the most well-kept one that had a functional kitchen, but they didn’t seem to mind (once Bahorel begged them to accept the offer, so as not to bring everyone in their already ransacked apartment).

“Enj, it’s so cold, and you had me go all the way across two small streets to get you this lovingly murdered piece of meat.”

Courfeyrac set an overstuffed canvas bag of meat and vegetables in the middle of the kitchen table. Enjolras stared at it, then looked up, to see more of their friends coming into the apartment, none of them as overdressed as Courfeyrac. It was a normal November afternoon, after all.

“I thought you were very enthused for this,” he said.

“Well, I am, but it’s _so. darn. cold_ ,” he whined, rubbing his hands together.

“Enj, do you need help?” Jehan asked, from the doorway, looking over Courfeyrac’s head.

The last time Enjolras had seen Jehan cook, it had been something more out of a strange children’s movie than a mere common activity. It had been, for sure, a mystical and intense experience, but not so much a culinary one.

“No, thank you, Jehan, I’m fine,” Enjolras said, forcing a smile. “There’s not that much room in here anyway.”

Musichetta’s head poked it from out on the balcony. “You _can_ fit three people in there, just so you know.”

“I did _not_ wish to know,” Courfeyrac said, but then laughed and went to join her.

From the conglomeration of people currently in the living room, Marius’s face came into focus. “Seriously, you’ll tell us if you need anything?”

And this was _Marius_. Enjolras made a face. “Yes, I swear I will not burn down the house.”

“Enjolras is _great_ at cooking,” Courfeyrac exclaimed from the balcony, letting a little bit of smoke in. “It’s just that he rarely ever bothers.”

“Or notices when we throw hints that he ought to bother more often,” Combeferre said, jovially.

Enjolras rolled his eyes. “There are much less time consuming ways of keeping alive.”

“That’s grim,” Cosette said, and grinned at him. “We’ll keep out of your way.”

After sending one more cursory look over the early-comers, Enjolras dutifully returned to the kitchen, and promptly had a flashback of his grandmother drilling the correct ways to chop onions into him. Perhaps adulthood was just you thinking back on the nightmarish experiences of your childhood and thinking _thank God for that_.

“Don’t be shy to ask us for help if you need any!” Bossuet said from the door, making Enjolras send a puff of flour unto his carefully chosen cooking clothes (i.e. Courfeyrac’s forever ignored gym clothes).

“Or if you need company!” Joly added.

Remembering social etiquette, Enjolras sent a floury smile their way before closing the door.

 

Cooking, Enjolras pondered, really wasn’t the same without a set of sharp and merciless eyes looking over your shoulder as you sprinkled in pepper. He knew that at some point the nostalgia was prone to kick in, making those summers dicing meat and potatoes and having his grocery shopping more thoroughly analysed than any CV he’d ever submitted in his life look like quaint, rose-tinted memories at the back of his mind, full of the now-pleasant screeches of seagulls and the not-so-bad-now-that-you-think-of-it smell of mussels in the market.

But Enjolras wasn’t at that point yet. For now, working nearly on autopilot as he recreated his childhood recipes, he was perfectly relieved to be alone, although it might have been nice to have somebody dice the carrots for him. But, he told himself, he wasn’t going to admit defeat.

That was until he heard some more exclamations join the dim sounds of conversations from the living room, and suddenly Feuilly was making excuses for Bahorel’s tardiness, Bahorel was making a loud, infomercial presentation of the bottles of port he’d found in a rickety store on the other side of town, and Grantaire was either complimenting or gently-berating Marius’s hair.

Enjolras registered all that, and added garlic over the already sizzling onions. He added a bit more oil. He counted to fifty-four as he mixed. Then, he lowered the flame, wiped his hands, and went to the door.

There, he stopped. With both the onions and the garlic in, the smell was too much like food to still be able to keep the others (i.e. Courfeyrac) at bay. He went back, covered the pan, and opened the window. He counted to twenty-eight.

This time, when he reached the door once more, he wondered whether enough time had passed. Were they out of their coats, or just now remembering to take them off? He turned back, took a deep breath that was more a backwards sigh, and drummed his fingers on all available surfaces. His eyes landed on the stove, and went to turn the contents around once more. Finally, he said he would count one last time, up to one hundred.

He got as far as thirteen. Then he went and opened the door anyway.

Most of the people in the living room seemed to be in various states of sprawling around a weird boardgame either Cosette or Joly had brought. Enjolras registered Feuilly, looking over a notebook he appeared to have taken out of Marius’s bag, Musichetta pouring wine into teacups, and Bossuet anxiously bringing more from the glass cabinet the apartment had come with. Then, he saw Grantaire mildly watching the game over Joly’s shoulder, and stared at him for the full twenty seconds it took for Grantaire to gaze back.

Enjolras made a very deliberate gesture for him to come over, and then closed the door before anyone could snap out of their game-trance and assault him with questions once more.

He’d already turned the flame back to its original height by the time Grantaire quietly slipped into the kitchen.

“Should I whisper?”

“I don’t know, were you followed?”

Grantaire grinned, then got right into Enjolras’s space, peeking into the pot. Enjolras swatted him away with the wooden spoon he used to stir the onions, but only got him to go elbow’s length away.

“I’ve been told that grandmotherly food would be provided, but, you know, when I first heard that, I didn’t expect you to be the cook,” Grantaire said, still trying to peer in.

Enjolras relented, but only slightly. “Care to explain why?”

“Not if you want to keep me in your good graces,” Grantaire said, almost sheepish. “What are you making?”

“Budget bœuf bourguignon.”

“And is it?”

“What?” Enjolras raised an eyebrow. “Beef? Budget? Bourguignon?”

Grantaire pointed at the half-full bottle of wine Enjolras had at the ready, meaning choice three. When Enjolras shrugged, he took the bottle and turned it this way and that, but it seemed like the wrapper had got lost at some point in time. So, eventually, he ended up taking a swig. The ensuing face was enough to make Enjolras choke on his swallowed laughter, and the bottle was set back with a clatter.

“God, that’s vile,” Grantaire gasped, going to fill a glass of water from the sink. “Is it vile? Is it just me? _Please_ , tell me.”

Then, he proceeded to down the glass while Enjolras had a sip of his own. “It’s vile,” he concluded, then took another sip. “But not unbearable.” He poured the rest in the pot.

“You go two years without any wine and this is how it repays you,” Grantaire muttered, nursing his nearly empty glass. He looked around. “You’re a surprisingly messy cook, did you know that?”

When Enjolras glanced back at him, he saw him putting the chopped vegetables into neat piles, then swiping the skins and the spilled flour off the table and into his hand. With an expert motion, Enjolras pushed the trashcan closer to him.

“I was going to clean that up,” he said, for posterity.

“Well, yeah, but just saying.”  Enjolras gave him a withering look, which for some reason made him smile. “How have you been?”

“Good,” Enjolras said, turning to what was not rapidly becoming a bubbling cauldron. “How did your shipment go?”

“Oh, man, it was so weird,” Grantaire said, mildly hovering about. “Like, there were some nice people, then some creepy people, and heavens, so much wrapping paper!” He put a hand on the tabletop, and looked up at the cupboards. “I think you would have enjoyed it, it was that rally in my third year all over again.”

“I know you want to sit on the counter, but don’t you dare,” Enjolras said, not looking away from the stove.

A surprised laugh escaped first, and then Grantaire crossed his arms. “It’s my God-given right as a short person.”

Enjolras gave in to the urge he’d had for twenty minutes, and threw some flour in his face. He was adding the butter and flour in anyway. “You’re not that short,” he said, while Grantaire spluttered.

“Yeah, but who has time to focus on that, when you’re towering about?” Grantaire said, and ruefully scrubbed at his face. “Aw, c’mon, what will the others think? Is there more where that came from?”

“Nope,” Enjolras said, and set the bowl well out of reach. “Pass me the beef?”

“In a sec,” Grantaire said, brushing off the last of the flour. “Here you go,” he offered him a plastic bowl and got close enough to peer into the bowl once more. “Hey, did you put in clove? My great-aunt used to put in clove. It was so good half of us thought she was a witch.”

“I put in clove,” Enjolras said, carefully adding the rest to the pot. “Do I put the carrots in now, or later?”

“Later, I think,” Grantaire said. “But if it were me, I’d put them in now, just to make sure they’re cooked.”

“Later, then.”

“You’re no fun.”

Enjolras wondered if he realised he’d had his hand on Enjolras’s back for quite a while now, or if he’d just forgotten.

“Do you see the pepper anywhere?”

They both looked around, and it was a rather small kitchen, really, but somehow Joly, Bossuet and Musichetta had managed to fill it up like a Christmas tree. It took quite a lot of craning about.

“Ah, there it is, I see it,” Grantaire said, and stepped away, his hand trailing down Enjolras’s back as he did so. “What now?” he asked before Enjolras even took the pepper from him.

“Now,” Enjolras said, vigorously mixing it in before covering it again, “we leave it for an hour and a half and pray.”

“Classy,” Grantaire said. “My grandpa sometimes cursed it into cooking itself, I think it gave it an edge.”

“Yes, I think that’s a mandatory step if you want it to taste anything like the original,” Enjolras said.

He looked at Grantaire. Grantaire, strangely, looked right back, without cracking another joke. “What now?” he asked again, this time more quietly.

Enjolras tore his eyes away and sighed, then sighed some more, for dramatic effect. “I’d kill for an actual glass of wine.”

“Then shall we join the land of the living?” Grantaire offered, arm making an ample arch towards the door.

Enjolras laughed. “Was this hell or purgatory?”

“Depends on how well that thing turns out,” he said, pointing at the simmering pot. Then, upon seeing Enjolras’s face, “O ye of little faith, huh?”

Enjolras ruffled some leftover flour out of Grantaire’s hair, then went round him and opened the door. The game, or whatever it had turned into by this point, was still ongoing, so it took a while for anyone to notice any new additions to the room. Yet, around ten minutes later, after Enjolras had safely procured himself a glass of wine to swish around as he watched the game from over Marius’s shoulder, Courfeyrac finally blinked up at him.

“Oh! I was sure you didn’t like my product and were incorporating Grantaire in the stew instead.” He narrowed his eyes. “Did you?”

Enjolras gave him a wordless smile and raised his hands.

Just as theatrically, Courfeyrac raised a slow hand to his mouth. “My God…”

“I’m _right_ here,” Grantaire raised his voice from halfway in the depths of an ancient grammophone, half-hidden in a cupboard.

“Any luck with that?” Musichetta asked, half-risen out of the sofa.

“Almost,” Grantaire said. There were a few more wooden sounds, then a few creaks, and then he poked his head out of the cupboard. “Who wants to listen to _I Girasoli_? ‘Cause this is the only vinyl this man seems to have left in this house.”

 

Two hours and three peeks into the kitchen later, Bahorel finally cracked. He literally slid down the couch and into the floor, a poor rendition of Humpty Dumpty. “Enj, this whole apartment smells like my mam’s house, what have you done?”

Enjolras sipped from his second glass of wine (the effects Monopoly had on him), and gave the question its due attention. Then decided not to answer anyway.

“You should make a scented candle,” Jehan said, to one or both of them.

Marius, sitting opposite from him, grimaced. “Oh, that’s disgusting.”

“Don’t knock it until you try it,” Jehan shrugged, but even Cosette was looking a bit distressed at the thought.

A solemn, or maybe mournful, silence settled over them.

Then Bossuet said, “I guess incense sticks would make more sense…”

“Right, I’m taking it out,” Enjolras said, downed his glass, and left the conversation with the speed of a hurricane.

Fortunately, the kitchen did not smell like smoke. He checked on the pot, letting even more fragrant steam rush up and out the open window, and finally turned off the flame, then crouched by the oven and stared at the vegetarian-alternative of Gratin Dauphinois until he deemed that, too, ready to be served.

When he looked up again, Grantaire was back in the kitchen too, and assessing him with a concentrated expression.

“You don’t have to be here,” Enjolras said, for propriety’s sake.

Grantaire shook his head. “No, I take my role as assistant cook very seriously.” He crouched on the other side of the oven and looked in. “Now that I know you’re neither going to cook, kill, or seduce me in this flower-patterned, coffin-sized room.”

“How do you know?” Enjolras asked, looking at him with as blank an expression as he could muster. “You haven’t tried any of this yet.”

There were several stages to Grantaire’s response, which started with a base of confusion, which was then layered with a thin sheet of surprise, followed by a sprinkle of amusement, until what resulted was a shaky laugh. “I guess that’s right. Do I get the honour?”

Enjolras gestured for him to deal with the oven and rose to his feet. There were several not-quite-matching bowls set aside by Joly earlier, and he picked one of those, and a ladle.

“By the way, you’re not assistant cook.”

Grantaire rose too, with the dish held with two kitchen towels as flowery as the walls. He looked devastated. “How can you say that when I’m doing such a good job?”

Enjolras suppressed a smile, but badly. He upturned the ladle into the bowl. “I’m just saying, I just wanted the company. Here, try this.”

He passed the bowl to Grantaire, once the gratins were safely stored far away from their hands. Grantaire looked down at the bowl, then up at Enjolras, and his grin was less hesitant now. “Entertainer cook then.” Enjolras rolled his eyes. “Okay, I’m trying this. If I die, tell my mom I loved you all.”

For five minutes, under Enjolras’s steadily less impressed stare, he turned the food this way and that, for all appearances like a scientist at a fair. Then, he looked up again, with a less pleasant smile.

“Have _you_ tried this?”

Enjolras groaned. “Come on, Grantaire.”

Grantaire laughed. “Sorry, just saying. But are you gonna?”

With one last sigh, Enjolras took the spoon out of his hand, tried it, and with just as little flourish set it back in the bowl and took both from Grantaire. “It’s fine, come on, let’s take it out.”

Grantaire was left gaping. “Wait, now I _don’t_ get to try it?”

Enjolras shrugged. “Lost your privileges. On we go.”

“No no no, wait,” Grantaire said quickly.

Catching hold of Enjolras’s hand to keep him in place, he then used his free hand to take a fresh spoonful out of the pot. This time, it only took a couple ceremonial moments to blow over it before he actually tried it.

Enjolras tried to tell his response from his handhold alone, but there was barely any reaction there either. Then, after another moment, Grantaire frowned, and took another spoonful.

 _I probably forgot the bay leaf again_ , he thought. His grandmother always chided him for that. Maybe the skies had finally listened to her.

Grantaire looked at him now, expression unreadable. “Really?”

“What?”

Under his relatively stern stare, if he said so himself, Grantaire first shook his head in a rather disapproving manner, then turned back to the stove and continued muttering under his breath.

Enjolras didn’t know why he’d expected anything different. “Grantaire…”

“Wait,” Grantaire said, even going as far as holding up his hand. He tasted half a spoonful more, then turned away from the stove, fretting with God-knew-what as he kept his back firmly to Enjolras.

“Is this like with Joly’s cake? You do not need to use expired tear drops in order to communicate your feelings to me.”

“No, shut up, just wait a moment,” Grantaire said, sounding like he struggled now. A moment later, he uttered a victorious sound, and turned to face the world once more. “There! This is for you, will you accept this?”

He reverently held something up for inspection. Enjolras dutifully inspected it, hands crossed.

“Is that the receipt from Courf’s shopping?”

“Is it? I don’t know. Don’t care. It’s a ring now, see, it even has a bow on top. So, marry me or let me marry your stew, whichever it is, although I’d personally prefer it to be the former, since you have the prettier eyes out of the pair. Will you say yes?”

Enjolras stared at it for a few moments longer. Then he looked at Grantaire, fully equipped with the intent to get at least one blank-faced reply in, which promptly broke down into laughter the moment he opened his mouth.

“Come on, is that a yes? This is really insensitive of you,” Grantaire said, with difficulty, through his own laughter, still holding up the tied receipt.

Enjolras found himself in the need to wipe away tears. “Can’t you say _yes, it’s good, well done_ like a normal person?”

“Of course I could,” Grantaire said, laugh subdued to a grin now, “but why do that when I can be my usual charming self? You have to admit it, you prefer it too.”

“Sure I do,” Enjolras said, wiping the last earthly remains of his tears. “But we can’t get married.”

Grantaire let his hand fall a fraction, in tune with his expression. “Why not?”

“‘Cause then we can’t really elope anymore,” Enjolras said.

For a moment, Grantaire just stared at him, but then his smile returned, and he pushed a little playfully at Enjolras’s shoulder. “Aw, here, what’s with you and elopement? If you mention it any more often, I’ll start thinking you’re serious, and then I’ll feel bad I haven’t looked up plane tickets yet.”

“Maybe you should,” Enjolras smiled.

Grantaire smiled back. “Maybe I should. So, what was it, Peru?”

“Panama.”

“Really? Why do I feel like we ultimately decided on Peru?”

“I’m certain a couple months ago you said a beach house in Panama.”

“You can have a beach house in Lima!”

“That’s beside the point.”

Grantaire gave him a comically annoyed look, then shook his head and seemed to become aware of the paper ring in his hand, for he raised it once more before Enjolras. “Anyway! Before we get there, do you accept this,” he tilted his head to look at it, “23.98€ engagement ring?”

“Sure,” Enjolras said, proffering his hand for the taking. “Like everything else in this torrid affair, built on Courfeyrac’s money, I see.”

“What a scandal we are,” Grantaire grinned, leaning closer.

Enjolras found himself wondering about the etiquette of kissing somebody without previous discussions on the subject; but only in a quiet way, at the back of his mind, away from his locomotory functions.

“You might as well wear it over your keychain or something, I really should have sized this better,” Grantaire said, when all attempts to fit it on a finger turned fruitless.

“Or Courfeyrac should have bought more caramelles,” Enjolras offered.

“Yes, let’s blame this on him too,” Grantaire nodded, finally letting go of Enjolras’s hand. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’ll just have a few more bowls of this, and then I think we’ll be ready to share it with the others, don’t you?”

Safely putting the ring in his pocket, Enjolras took a seat at the crowded kitchen table. “I wouldn’t advise you taking more than one helping, my grandmother made it especially rich.”

“Watch me,” Grantaire said, but he only put a couple spoonfuls in a candy bowl before sitting down with it.

Enjolras let himself entertain the idea that it was slightly strange for both of them to be sequestered here, while all their (probably silently famished) friends were waiting in the other room, but only for a little while. The next moment, he grabbed the nearest available spoon and cracked the top of Cosette, Jehan, and (again, surprisingly) Bahorel’s pommes gratins.

“Say, wasn’t your grandma from Marseille?” Grantaire asked when he was done, and Enjolras had managed to eat 3.4 slices of potato. “If this is what she did with beef, I can’t dream of what she did with fish. Can I meet her?”

Enjolras shrugged. “She was a pariah for not really liking fish, actually. The only time she cooked it was when fasting.”

“What a _shame,_ but now I see where your rebellious streak comes from.” Grantaire leant over his elbows, like before expelling a secret. “I make a mean bouillabaisse, I’ve been told, if you ever wanna get in touch with your Provençal roots.”

With a touch of inspiration, Enjolras gave him his classic business smile, and leant back. “You’re in charge of Christmas dinner, then.”

Grantaire offered him a loud gasp for his efforts. “How totalitarian, shouldn’t we put this to a vote first?”

“I’m alone here, and I voted.”

“No, we also need an impartial party,” Grantaire said, already rising from the table. He opened the door and poked his head outside. “Joly, do you think I should be in charge of food on Christmas?”

“What? Yes! Of course!”

“Thank you!” He shut the door, on a background of several questions about the state of the food, and grinned. “Guess that settles it. You’ll eat so many mussels you’ll turn into a seagull. Should we finally feed the masses?”

“If we must,” Enjolras sighed, pushing himself up too, along with the dish of potatoes.

“And,” Grantaire said, just before they opened the door again, slightly knocking his hip into Enjolras’s, “I’ll keep an eye out for plane tickets offers.”

“You do that,” Enjolras said, and went, as the prophets said, to feed the masses.


	5. Grantaire

It could’ve been just the architecture, or the fact that some parts of this still felt like a particularly overachieving fever dream, but Italy at the end of autumn didn’t feel as cold as France. And Grantaire had lived by the sea most of his childhood, so it wasn’t like he had any real experience with harsh weather. Winter, in his head, was the feeling of muddy slush from the side of the road trickling down the inside of your pant’s leg.

> **Marius** : really i think it’d be easier for you to just buy something new?
> 
> **Jehan** : that’s not the point

As such, he was still living his best life, much later in the season than usual, and he had just recently had to break in those purple fingerless gloves Jehan had given him, _to go well with those grape-vines you keep hidden in sweaters ten months a year anyway_ , apparently. Which was a fair point, but it wasn’t anyone but nature’s fault that Grantaire was born with poor blood circulation.

> **Cosette** : i agree, this would make it look way more personal.
> 
> **Marius** : and messy?
> 
> **Cosette** : honestly, marius, it’s just a bit of ink.

His hands were thus only half-frozen (but still living their best life) even as he fiddled with pencils in an attempt to choose between Persian Grey, Dove Grey, Petrol Grey or Steel Grey. As it often happened, he ended up leaving the aisle with yet another shade of ochre, and took a turn into pastel land. And because his phone had been silently blowing up for the past hour or so (some debate or other on the use of old ink cartridges in home decor), he chose to just add his own 2 cents to the pile.

> **Grantaire** : i say go wild
> 
> **Grantaire** : feu do u want me to get u those watercolours u were talking about im by the belle arti
> 
> **Feuilly** : keep them in alcohol overnight and it’s fine
> 
> **Jehan** : but the point was for the ink TO spill
> 
> **Feuilly** : also, yes, r, please
> 
> **Jehan** : aaaah belle arti
> 
> **Jehan** : who are you there with
> 
> **Grantaire** : no one, just me and my bored shadow on the floor

One day, he was sorely going to regret having told Jehan, a few weeks into their stay in Italy, in a rather fitting 4 am and 4 cups of coffee mood, that the moment he found the love of his life, he’d take them directly to belle arti, just to see if his heart or the universe could take two objects of his affection in the same place.

> **Cosette** : do you think I can find something for painting leather there? I need it for my boots
> 
> **Jehan** : yes dont use acrylics
> 
> **Feuilly** : most prob

One smile at the cashier, an ungodly amount of crinkling as he stuffed the bag beside all the shit he had in his bag, a bite out of his own heart as he saw a sale on oil paints only as he got out the door, and Grantaire was back to the not-as-cold but still cold Italian weather, the sky blue as the underside of a glacier, not a cloud in sight, and the sun shining very unproportionally to the amount of warmth it was giving.

> **Grantaire** : ok got them
> 
> **Feuilly** : thank you!
> 
> **Grantaire** : also got some leather paint for those in need
> 
> **Cosette** : THANK YOU!!! BLESS YOU!!!
> 
> **Cosette** : no, wait, i mean: GRAZIE MILLE!!!!
> 
> **Grantaire** : prego

Hanging out more with Cosette was one of the best and three most unexpected things to come out of this year abroad for him, even if it meant her inviting him “for tea” and then unsubtly tricking him into tutoring her and Marius in Italian. Unsubtly -- they’d even had notebooks prepared, in between the couch pillows.

He took a turn down the street and haphazardly tried to run his schedule through his head. He’d got supplies, there were still some more canvases at home from when he and Feuilly found them at a ridiculous price for a ridiculous amount, food was getting taken care of since he’d taken pity on Bahorel the other day and made a gargantuan amount of garbure, and the bills had been paid earlier that week. Grantaire resisted doing a double-take at his own mind. The fact that he seemed to be self-sufficient without any previous tutoring was battling with Cosette for second place on that list.

Technically, he thought, he could just go home and start some new work, without even having to juggle four chores he’d postponed for weeks. That never used to happen.

He’d gone at least four blocks away from the arts supply store when the miscellaneous clutter in his bag started vibrating, and he had to duck into a disused doorway to fish his phone out of it successfully. And it was Enjolras, calling. This was something he sometimes did, nowadays. He hadn’t used to do that.

This fact and everything that had led up to it was a bright and shiny question mark at the top of that up-mentioned list.

“Hey,” Grantaire said, squeezing the phone between cheek and shoulder as he commenced to stuff the miscellaneousness back into his bag.

“Hi,” Enjolras said. “Can you talk?”

“The rationalist jury’s still out on that,” Grantaire said. “But yes, sure,” he added, when Enjolras sighed.

“So I was looking up those plays you mentioned a few days ago, and this popped up,” Enjolras said. “Did you know they have _La clemenza di Tito_ at the teatro comunale?”

Grantaire successfully heaved the bag back to his shoulder, and stepped out of the doorway before any bits of roof could fall on him. “No, do they?” Then, before Enjolras could go on, “Why were you looking them up?

There was a telling pause, then, “I was curious?”

“Bullshit,” Grantaire grinned, taking another corner. “When’s your next viva?”

This time, the silence was even more poignant, which only served to widen his grin even more. “...in three days,” Enjolras confessed.

“Ha!”

“That proves nothing.”

“Sure it doesn’t,” Grantaire said, “and I went to the Savoy in my 2nd year because of the view, and not because I was avoiding my final project.”

“Did you?”

“Take a guess.” Then, as he literally felt the silence pressing on him, “It’s going to be _fine_ , Enjolras.”

“But I still want to see the play,” Enjolras said, and Grantaire might have been hallucinating, although he probably was not, but he actually sounded petulant this time.

“Alright,” he said. “When is it?”

“Tomorrow,” Enjolras said.

“And they still have tickets?” Grantaire said, awonder.

“It’s November,” Enjolras said.

“Barely,” Grantaire said. “It’s almost the holiday season, look outside!” And he gestured at the perfectly dry and amazingly sunny weather, for all the feral pigeons (the natural predator in Italy, it seemed) on the sidewalk to see.

Meanwhile, Enjolras was getting more verbose, “But it seems I need to go there and get them, because this site is giving me nothing. You’d think they’d want to make tickets as easy as possible to acquire.”

“Aw, look at you,” Grantaire cooed, “having your first try at theatre logistics. It’s probably hidden behind three more hyperlinks.”

Enjolras groaned. “At this rate, it would be faster to just go there.”

“You sound like an old man,” Grantaire said, only mildly aware that his cheeks were hurting just a bit. “Kids and their computers,” he grouched, and his cheeks instantly hurt even more once he heart Enjolras laugh.

“Do you want to get coffee?” Enjolras then asked.

Grantaire’s thought process drew a sudden blank. “Er, when?” he asked, then mentally slapped himself. “Now?”

“Since I’m apparently going out anyway,” Enjolras said, and Grantaire could _hear_ him shrug. “Unless you’re busy,” he backtracked, but only mildly.

“When am I ever?” Grantaire asked, fully expecting the unimpressed noise that always followed it. “Sure, I have time,” he then said. “Meet you round and about the theatre?”

“If the logistics don’t kill me,” Enjolras said, and Grantaire snorted, and that was that.

Grantaire stared at his phone for a while after the call ended, feeling, as he usually did, those days, like he had been given a puzzle with no key, so that however much he turned it around, he still wasn’t able to see the big picture. So he did what he’d kept on doing, and just went along with it, hoping that when the key did appear, it would not fall on his head like a piece of plaster off an old building like those that lined the city.

 

When he eventually arrived at the teatro comunale, he found Enjolras glaring fiery daggers at a big and leafy programme on a bench close by. “It’s not going to spark aflame, no matter how much you try,” Grantaire said. And, when Enjolras looked up at him, he added, “else I would have turned to cinder years ago.”

And somehow, that made Enjolras smile instead of roll his eyes. “Got them,” he said, showcasing two freshly-printed tickets.

“I’m so proud of you,” Grantaire said, in his most earnest voice, one hand over his heart. He’d learnt that from Courfeyrac.

Now, _there_ was that eye roll. “I didn’t know what seats worked best, so I let them choose for me,” Enjolras said, passing one of the tickets to Grantaire.

“I’m fine with whatever,” Grantaire said, and the reality of the fact that Enjolras seemed to have only bought two tickets didn’t crash into him like a wave, as much as it started tricking more and more, like a leak in the ceiling of his mind. He shook his head. “Tell me how much I owe you.”

Enjolras leant back against the bench and looked at him. “Buy me coffee,” he said, with a shrug.

Grantaire’s smile was hesitant at best, but he was trying. “I can hardly imagine that covers it.”

“Buy me more coffees, then,” Enjolras offered, easily, which was more than a bit unfair, in the circumstances.

“Alright, then,” Grantaire shrugged too. “A little more caffeine per diem and you’ll start looking like Hamlet.”

“I don’t like _Hamlet_.”

“Of course you don’t,” said Grantaire, who loved _Hamlet_.

He heaved his bag onto the bench between them, forgetting about the bottles for a moment and grimacing when they clanged against each other. When he rushed to look inside, though, they all, mercifully, seemed to be in one piece. He felt Enjolras lean in to peek at it too.

“How many things are you lugging around with you?” he asked.

“I overestimated the allure of freshly opened pastels,” Grantaire admitted, then started rummaging inside, talking as he did. “Also, I got Cosette this metallic leather paint she wants to use on her boots, which sounds great, if it works well, I should ask her help with mine too, why didn’t I ever think of that? I could’ve walked around the city with electric pink skulls on my shoes for months now, that’s such a waste for humanity in general.”

He pulled out two small bottles of lilac and turquoise paint to show him.

Enjolras analysed them with a mild frown. “I somehow strangely agree.”

“Finally, some validation,” Grantaire grinned and put them more carefully back in the bag. “Ohhh, by the way, if the paint works, can I please leave socialist curses in braille on your bag?”

Enjolras gave him a look. “You know braille too now?”

“I was bored on summer camp in high school,” Grantaire shrugged.

Another look, even more unintelligible than the last, and then, “How would it work, anyway? You wouldn’t be able to actually read it.”

“It’s a metaphor,” Grantaire said, and laughed when the third look in the series came his way. “Okay, shall we go? I somehow worked myself to a ridiculous thirst for linden tea on the way here and I think my body had started burning itself from the inside out in an attempt to soothe it.”

“That’s very specific,” Enjolras said, getting to his feet.

“The _terra incognita_ : non-caffeinated drinks,” Grantaire said, following his lead for once, “you should give them a try, your blood pressure might thank you.”

“Well, last I checked,” Enjolras said, “you had a budget of 25€ to convince me.”

And then he smiled at Grantaire, in a very simple and unsarcastic way, which was one of the worst things that had happened to him in his whole life, let alone in this damn, indescribable year.

 

Enjolras, with the confidence of one who had studied the google maps layout of the entire neighbourhood for twenty minutes before settling on a destination, led them to a small cafe hidden in a maze of winding streets and low buildings, and then, as if the day was not weird enough already, seated himself without preamble at a corner table, provided with one rickety chair and a sofa that logically could have housed at least three people, but which Grantaire still though rather small, for two people to sit in dim light at.

He spent most of the time waiting for their drinks (tea for his own dubious thirsts, coffee for Enjolras, for this one time, but decaf, just to see if he could tell the difference) considering the benefits of that lone chair and whether it would have been weird to drag another one over, when there was visibly more than enough space for both of them. Then, when the time came, and he turned to see Enjolras frowning with rather comical focus at a menu left on the table, Grantaire felt his shoulders deflate.

 _Fuck it_ , he thus thought, and just seated himself beside him.

“Let me guess,” he said, pushing one cup in Enjolras’s line of sight, “they didn’t put the full list of allergens.”

“No,” Enjolras said. “What the hell does _orzo_ mean again?”

“No fucking idea,” Grantaire said, looking over. “Wanna try?”

Enjolras glanced at him, then abandoned the menu with a sigh, “Maybe not right now.”

“That’s fair,” Grantaire said, and strived to make himself comfortable, even if that meant turning fully towards Enjolras. “By the way,” he began. “I looked at that manifesto you sent me last night ‒ also by the way, 3 am, great time for intellectual purposes, thank you for respecting that.”

Enjolras stared at him. “You did? What did you think?” Then, much too late, “It’s not a manifesto.”

“Sure,” Grantaire sipped his tea more carefully now. “I left you some comments and notes online.”

“I knew I should’ve changed my phone subscription,” Enjolras groaned, looking at his phone, evidently not liking what he saw there, and stuffing it right back into his pocket. “Make me a summary?” he tried.

“Nuh-uh. No way,” Grantaire shook his head. “That’s on you. Consider it your nightly reading. Grand-père’s lost fairy tale about consumerism and relative clauses.”

“My favourite thing to see before I fall asleep,” Enjolras said drily.

Grantaire grinned. “That tone only works if you’re lying.”

“Stop policing my speech habits,” Enjolras retorted, in much the same tone. Then, “Has Combeferre told you about that graphic design workshop?” he asked, wrapping his hands around his cup.

“Very much so,” Grantaire said. “In great detail. He somehow managed to conjure a whiteboard in my own head. It was _very_ impressive.”

“He does that,” Enjolras nodded. “Are you interested?”

“ _Maybe_ ,” Grantaire said.

In truth, he was still reeling from the thought that one of his friends (who wasn’t even Feuilly or Bahorel, who lived with him and thus gathered some intelligence on it, or Joly and Bossuet, who’d known him longest and spent many a college night crying over reality TV with him) could see something and think of him without prompting. Years after the bleakest times of his life, and it still caught him unawares. Maybe he _was_ a bit slow sometimes, like Bahorel had told him once.

“Maybe you could revolutionize theatre websites afterwards,” Enjolras was saying, and Grantaire looked back at him with an uncertain grin.

“You can’t wait to see me in a revolution of any sort,” he teased, once again both revelling in and deploring the smile on Enjolras’s face at that moment.

“Guillotine me for trying, would you?” he said.

Grantaire leant closer to peer at his face. “Did you just make a non-politically charged guillotine joke?”

It seemed like Enjolras was staving off a laugh. “Don’t push your luck.”

It hadn’t been like this, those few years before. Grantaire had tried not to think about it, knowing that the number of things he could think himself into believing, if left enough time on his own, was boundless, but every now and then a moment of reflection still slipped in, even through music blasting in his ears or with his hands wrist-deep in dripping paint. And, during those, he’d half-expected the hurt and hopelessness of those early days to come rushing back in, like tar in his mind, but they never did.

There was only this unfamiliar, quiet sort of contentment that had settled over him before he had any say in the matter, and the occasional moments peppered over his daily life, when the yearning he felt to reach out and touch was so strong that he had to carefully plan his every gesture, for fear he’d give in if he forgot himself for even a moment.

As such, Grantaire methodically crossed his arms, just so he’d know their exact position.

“Did Eponine and Gavroche find tickets for Christmas?” Enjolras asked.

Grantaire felt his blood circulate just the slightest bit more warmly, both at the thought, and at the fact that he did remember. “Thankfully, yes,” he sighed, loudly, for emphasis. “We’d almost given up, but then two tickets were freed, like some sort of karmic present, and they’re coming just before New Year’s. Enough time to find a futon.”

“You should ask Bossuet to help you hunt for sales, he’s quite good at that,” Enjolras said, drinking his coffee and apparently not sensing anything weird about it just yet.

“Now that’s an unexpected piece of advice,” Grantaire said, blinking, “but welcome, nonetheless.”

“I thought the same,” Enjolras said, “but then Ferre asked him to come with us when we were shopping for furniture back in Paris, and at the end of the day I still had money to pay for my métro pass.”

Grantaire whistled as softly as he could, given that they _were_ in a cafe. “Point taken.” Then, because he’d just remembered, “Do you want to see this commission Bahorel helped me finish?”

There were nearly actual sparkles in Enjolras’s eyes. “Y _es_ ,” he said, with an emphasis that would have earned three underlines on paper.

Grantaire laughed, and pulled out his phone. “Okay, so, first of all, he’s not as good as you, but he was pretty close, especially when he suggested we bring the boxing gloves in. So, here it was during the first step -”

 

When they went out once more in the light of day, the sky was as clear as ever, and the sun must have been around there somewhere, but the temperature seemed to have dropped by ten degrees. Grantaire said, “Hey, remind me to show you that one balcony I found where this lady’s cat comes out and begins meowing in time with the 2 o’clock chimes.”

“Is this a proven repeat occurrence?” Enjolras asked.

“Of course,” Grantaire said, rubbing his hands. “Saw and heard it three times so far, with my own eyes and ears.”

“Were you stalking that poor woman’s cat?” Enjolras asked. Then, “What’s that?”

“I would never do that, I was merely a spectator at a great live performance.” Grantaire glanced back. “What’s what?”

When he turned, he saw Enjolras crouching by a desolate bench, peering intently underneath it, which was never a normal sight, when Enjolras was concerned, who could set very dry leaves and small twigs aflame with his glare alone. Grantaire took the necessary three steps back, then peered underneath the bench too.

“That,” he said, after a moment, “is also a cat. And a mean one at that.”

Ignoring his words completely, there was Enjolras, a universal kid- and pet-repellent, stretching out his hand and making some sounds that by a process of elimination alone could have been meant to attract small animals to him. For a moment, Grantaire just watched, sure it was just another part of the fever dream, but when Enjolras kept crouching and making strange noises, he pulled out his phone and took a picture.

When five minutes went past, he said, “I don’t think it wants to come out.”

Enjolras huffed, raised himself to his feet with a lack of groaning that Grantaire found highly suspicious, and began following Grantaire once more. But then, from behind, the cat started to catch up, fast, rather short steps taking it past them until it was just out of their reach. And Grantaire looked at Enjolras, and Enjolras looked at him, and they both began quickening their pace as one, on its tail.

 

They tailed it all the way to the river, which wasn’t particularly hard. It was a mountain of shaggy orange fur and probably deadly sharp points. It was magnificent.

Grantaire had taken his pep-talk voice out of the dusty drawer of his mind, and was now trying it on for size. “So, remember: leave the food, call the cat, let it start eating, and only when it’s fully engrossed grab it.”

They’d only found the senior variety of wet cat food (by far superior) at the store, in their rush to go in and out both like human beings and without giving the cat enough time to get out of their sight, but, as Grantaire had stated even then, _never too late to start caring for your articulations_.

Enjolras stared at him. “I don’t think I can just _grab_ it.”

Breaking away from the silence chase, Grantaire did a double-take. “What did we chase all this way for, then?!”

“I don’t know!” Enjolras raised his hands. “I didn’t plan that far ‒ give me that.”

And, just like that, he took the cat food out of Grantaire’s hands and went to leave it wide in the open with all the determination of a cavalry captain. The cat stood still, but didn’t look back before was back to their camp, a stone bench even farther away. Grantaire took a picture.

“What are you even going to do with those?” Enjolras asked.

“Make a stop-motion movie short on the folly of man,” Grantaire said, examining the picture.

“Funny,” Enjolras said, sighed, and leant into Grantaire’s side, eyes on the trees lining the road.

Grantaire waited to see if his attention might shift in the near future, and when it didn’t, he sighed and leant a bit into him too.  His phone buzzed in his hand a few times, but he ignored it for once, absentmindedly gazing at the cat. The cat which, his eyes now informed him, had fully pounced on the food.

Grantaire laughed. “Look at it go.” Then, when neither made a move towards it, “What do you think we should name it? You know, to give some flavour to the stories we’ll tell our grandkids. We need to have a name.”

“Guillaume,” Enjolras said.

“No, that’s terrible,” Grantaire said. “What about Sylvestre? With a y.”

“No.”

“Come ooon,” Grantaire drawled, pushing his head into what he had to assume was Enjolras’s shoulder.

As a response to that, Enjolras crossed his arms and slunk lower down the bench, until they were head- and shoulder-level. He gazed at Grantaire with a look he usually saved for messy work spaces and un-indexed essays, which was more than enough incentive for Grantaire to grin back; before leaning in, just a bit.

“Go get the girl,” he said, in a stage whisper.

Enjolras merely stared at him wide-eyed, seemingly at a loss for several moments, before looking away with a huff. “Jesus, Grantaire.”

But there was a smile, barely there on his lips.

“We can’t name the cat Grantaire,” Grantaire said, aware but not impressed with the fact that his hands had deemed it reasonable to start shaking right about then, when they hadn’t all day, not even when he’d felt them turn to icicles in the wind.

“Gertrude, then,” Enjolras offered, smile more pronounced now.

“I don’t know if I should feel offended,” Grantaire said. “And I thought you didn’t like _Hamlet_.”

“I don’t,” Enjolras said, then seemed to debate for a moment, before sighing and getting up from the bench with hardly any flourish.

Grantaire was just in time to get out of his quarter-life crisis and take three consecutive pictures before Enjolras proved that miracles were real and picked up the cat without being mauled to death.

When Grantaire approached them, Enjolras looked up and said, definitively, “Vespasien.”

Grantaire made a face. “Well…”

“It stays,” Enjolras said, hitching the cat to a better position in his arms, although what could possibly be something approaching comfort for that mound of orange resentment Grantaire found hard to guess.

He took another picture, much to Enjolras’s dissatisfaction. Then another, brandishing it with a grin. “It’s great, you two have the same face, although right now I’m not sure for which one it’s genetic.”

“I think the claws just reached skin,” Enjolras offered, conversationally.

Grantaire stared at the cat, which otherwise looked as impassive as it could, sans the heavily-sunken claws in Enjolras’s dark coat. “That’s how many layers now?”

“Three,” Enjolras said, looking down at the cat in his arms like a very messy-haired and unfortunate _Madonna and Child_ painting.

Grantaire whistled and took a couple steps closer. “Let’s see,” he said, as the two of them started slowly prying off each talon from Enjolras’s sleeve.

Yet, when all was done, Grantaire was still somehow surprised to realise he was the one holding the cat now. He chose to take it in stride though, like he’d done with the multiple feral cats Gavroche had seen fit to introduce him to, and hugged it to his chest as he made his way back to the bench.

Where he held its face at eye-level and grinned at it. “Who’s a massive ball of fury? It’s you, isn’t it?”

“Stop _jiggling_ it,” Enjolras said, from somewhere close by.

“I’m not, my arms were trembling under the weight,” Grantaire said, then shifted right back into cooing. “Who’s the biggest furball alive? Still you, isn’t it? Look at that face, look at it, you could be a republican.”

“Hilarious,” Enjolras said, and when Grantaire looked up to grin at him too, he saw him just pocketing his phone. “ _Occhio per occhio_ ,” Enjolras smiled.

“Yeah, right, you were just waiting for an excuse to take a picture of me in my natural habitat,” Grantaire said, letting the cat free to run away, its furred presence looking even more disgruntled than before.

“Is it?” Enjolras asked, seating himself beside him once more.

“Used to be,” Grantaire grinned, getting used to gesticulate majorly. “Back when I used to live with Eponine, Gav brought all those strays home all the time, it was a miracle we didn’t have a flea infestation, they got _everywhere_ , even ripped the curtains that one time, before Eponine made it clear that the next cat he brought home would end up in her soup.”

“That explains why he kept trying to walk Marius home when they first met, he used to have those two old cats back home,” Enjolras said.

“That’s it,” Grantaire nodded, then unlocked his phone and sent an assortment of half a dozen carefully selected pictures of Enjolras in different phases of either trying to catch the cat unawares or just to goad it to come closer, in several different locations on their way.

> **Grantaire** : this is vespasien
> 
> **Grantaire** : he’s fat, ugly, probably would have voted for napoleon, and we love him
> 
> **Bossuet** : what’s happening
> 
> **Joly** : is that an actual animal enj is actually trying to touch
> 
> **Cosette** : oh, my god…

Enjolras leaned in to read over his shoulder. “I thought you hated that name.”

“I have my weaknesses,” Grantaire said. Then, when he felt Enjolras staring at him, “Imagining our orange republican child being bullied at school for being named after the founder of the Flavian dynasty,” he explained. “ _and_ that exact face you’re making right now, yes.”

Enjolras laughed and looked away, which only added a _mere_ five years to Grantaire’s lifespan.

> **Cosette** : R, I’m going to cry, where did you find him??
> 
> **Bahorel** : nah no way im calling photoshop bullshit
> 
> **Musichetta** : i say real life, else he would have fixed that hair before sending it
> 
> **Cosette** : real talk, can i adopt him?
> 
> **Bahorel** : ^same
> 
> **Joly** : where even are you guys??
> 
> **Grantaire** : no idea. we were maimed shortly after these pics so i can only assume the afterlife
> 
> **Grantaire** : the afterlife has a strangely unimaginative colour range btw 3/10
> 
> **Bahorel** : i told u u should have become an art critic while u were alive
> 
> **Grantaire** : nah this is better for publicity

Enjolras snorted and leant back. Then, with a sigh, he pulled out his phone too. “I can’t believe I’m about to pay for mobile data for this.”

And Grantaire watched, with a kind of wondrous glee, how Enjolras logged on and proceeded to send a few consecutive photos of Grantaire in various states of either grinning or pouting at the cat held up to his face. He hadn’t even been aware there were more than the one when he’d caught him in the act.

> **Enjolras** : all in one piece.
> 
> **Joly** : haha, okay but if you got scratched, make sure you clean it as soon as you can
> 
> **Joly** : oh, nvm, that’s cute as shit!!!
> 
> **Bossuet** : you cracked jolly, guys
> 
> **Cosette** : can i adopt him? (chorus)
> 
> **Marius** : (we’re not technically allowed to)
> 
> **Marius** : but please, yes

Grantaire found himself laughing. “What have we done? We’ve started a movement. Is this how you guys feel when you organize a rally?”

“One way to find out, don’t you think?”

“Peer pressurer.”

> **Grantaire** : he’s run off now, but i’ll give you the approx location and you can come a-hunting when you feel like it
> 
> **Cosette** : i knew i’d kept my weekend open for something!
> 
> **Cosette** : grazieee <3

“She’ll surely paint your boots now too,” Enjolras said, back to reading over Grantaire’s shoulder.

“I’m glad I’m not the only one invested in my fashionable future,” Grantaire said, pulling his feet up on the bench and crossing his legs. Once set, he glanced at Enjolras. “When we tell this to the grandkids, we’ll embellish it with some more scratches and cuts which we’ll obviously accompany with _no, we can’t show you right now, they’re in very inappropriate places_.”

“You’d tell kids this?”

Grantaire shrugged. “That, or _grandpa had to exchange all his skin with robotic flesh when he found out that tattoos in the future can move_.”

“What year would this be, exactly?”

“Oh, shush, we’ve all seen _Back to the Future_. Repeatedly. Three times a week sometimes. All our childhoods. Let me dream.” Grantaire glanced at him.

Enjolras shrugged. “Moving tattoos sound cool.”

“I know, right?” Grantaire grinned, turning fully towards him. “Okay, listen, I’ve thought about this in detail. So, it would start from this one clam going in circles around the wrist, then go up with ‒”

Which turned into a half-hour session of Grantaire running him through a dozen possible designs he’d made up at night whenever he couldn’t sleep (which, case in point, used to be often), and which included, respectively: a winter forest slightly shifting in the wind across his back, with the moon causing soft sparkles on the lake underneath the trees, a squid floating randomly in the sky on his shoulders, a psychedelic nautilus shell constantly spirally on his temple, a small hummingbird that would flit from one finger to the other so that he could flip the bird more genuinely, the addition of moving ants and caterpillars on the vines and ivy he already had all over both his arms and which so many people seemed to take it personally that he didn’t display more often, at the price of him freezing his ass to death, and so on.

“I don’t think I’ve seen those more than two or three times,” Enjolras chose to admit then, adding himself to the crowd of people wanting to see him die of hypothermia.

Maybe it was all for the best that they were close to the most natural parting spot by then, because instead of saying that, instead of accusing him of a soulless betrayal, like he did with most everybody, Grantaire said, “Well, you’d only have to ask.” Then, like a fugitive frantically covering his tracks in the snow, “Remind me of that when I’m next seated next to a radiator.”

And Enjolras had the cheek to look pleased, like that was the answer he’d been hoping for. “Or wait for warmer weather.”

“ _Or,_  Grantaire interjected, at a spark of genius, “maybe I should start migrating, like birds.” They came to a stop where their paths started to diverge, and Grantaire stuffed his gloved hands in his pockets and turned on his heel to face him. “How’s that exam stress feel?”

Enjolras closed his eyes with a sigh. “Why did you have to ruin a very pleasant afternoon?”

Grantaire grinned, although he was starting to feel a bit lightheaded. “To remind you that I’m human and thus fallible, despite my otherworldly entertaining techniques.”

Enjolras snorted, and opened his eyes. “See you tomorrow?”

Somehow, Grantaire found the strength to raise an eyebrow in question.

A somewhat sly expression made its slow way over Enjolras’s face. “The very reason I went out of my cave was to get us tickets, remember?”

“Oh,” Grantaire breathed, then nodded. “Right, I’d forgotten. See you there.”

So they parted, with only minimal casualties. Yet, before they were quite out of earshot, Grantaire still turned around and yelled after him, “Did you realise I got you decaf earlier?” Then he beamed at Enjolras’s first surprised, then betrayed expression, and quickened his pace as he walked away.

His hands might still have been shaking a bit, and not just from the cold, and sure, it was as if he’d stuffed cotton-balls in his head at some point during the day, but Grantaire was going to take this glee he felt now to his grave, and the flowers that would sprout over it would tell the story on their petals for any curious passerby to see, like some strange, ecological oracle of old.


	6. Enjolras

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, wasn't this _fun_.  
> Thank you all for reading!

The faucet of the kitchen sink was leaking, or maybe it was just emulating the state of every storm drain in the city, once the snow that had started falling outside in the early hours of the morning  would be hit by the first rays of sunlight. Either way, Enjolras kept staring at it, a pen still hanging precariously over a scribbled page, several markers drying in the other, as he waited for Courfeyrac to stop trying to seduce the food delivery person on the other end of the phone call, and _please_ just recite their order as they had rehearsed.

Across from him at the kitchen table, and occupying a vastly smaller amount of space than Enjolras did with all his photocopies and redacted essays, Jehan was scribbling on a piece of paper, their handwriting an improbable mix of twirls and dashes. This time, though, as Courfeyrac let out a particularly loud burst of laughter just out in the hallway, they looked up, and smiled.

“When we went out,” they said, in a whisper, leaning over the table, “I made sure to always have a notebook with me whenever we went somewhere, because he provided such good background noise for whatever I was doing.”

Enjolras gave them a doubtful look. “I can hardly believe you weren’t listening.”

“Oh, I was,” Jehan said, drawing back, “but it was still good background noise,” and they returned to whatever they were doing before.

“Done,” Courfeyrac announced, coming into the kitchen. “As long as the roads don’t freeze, we shall have gross amounts of pancakes and doughnuts brought to our door for breakfast. Good thinking, calling them before the snow got heavier.”

“We could’ve made omelette,” Enjolras muttered into his papers.

He felt Courfeyrac press a rather forceful kiss to the top of his head. “Don’t be such a sourpuss in front of dear Jehan.” Then he applied the same treatment to Jehan’s hair, although Enjolras couldn’t help noticing it was mildly less forceful in that case.

“I’m dying for pancakes,” Jehan said, closing their eyes against the mere mention.

“Same,” Courfeyrac said, picking up one of Enjolras’s sheets. “Eugh, I hate commercial law. Please get this out of the public eye.”

“Please get yourself out of my public eye,” Enjolras offered, earning a very theatrical gasp. “This is your fault, you kept us in the dark for two days.”

“How was I supposed to know we were paying bills by rotation?” Courfeyrac asked. “Who wants coffee?”

“When I was a freshman in college, I stayed without central heating for two months in autumn,” Jehan said. When they both looked at them, they shrugged. “I forgot to pay for it, and then I wanted to see just how much we needed coals to keep alive.”

“Coals?” Enjolras asked.

“Jehan, your college experience is a boundless void of mismatching facts bringing wonder in our daily lives,” Courfeyrac said, with something like reverence, as he watched the coffee drip into their one and only pot, right alongside the dripping sink.

“I never finished,” Jehan sighed. “I’m thinking I might go back when I’m thirty and my eyes see sunlight differently.”

Enjolras looked at them, then glanced over his shoulder at Courfeyrac, who shrugged back. “You know best, Jehan,” Courfeyrac said, in the end.

“I do, don’t I,” Jehan said, absentmindedly, already focused once more on whatever they were doing.

“So,” Courfeyrac said, coming beside Enjolras’s chair, one full pot of coffee in hand, “do you think Ferre would make it home in one piece?”

Enjolras threw a glance at the window, where the snowflakes were the size of dinner plates by now. “With enough luck.” He sighed and looked back down at the papers underneath his hands and elbows and, soon enough, by the feel of it, chin. “I’m never going to finish these, am I?”

Courfeyrac laughed, patting his back. “Of course you will,” he said, and turned away to fill a few mismatched mugs. “Just not today.”

Enjolras leant back with a groan. It was still morning, and yet words had never rang truer in his head. He had to dig through several notes and essays and a few wayward napkins before he found his phone.

> **Enjolras** : how much of jehan’s college tales are just urban myths by now?
> 
> **Grantaire** : about 12%
> 
> **Grantaire** : you’d be surprised what the sophomores spoke of them even before i graduated
> 
> **Enjolras** : would i, really
> 
> **Grantaire** : okay, you’ve known them longer, maybe not
> 
> **Grantaire** : by the way………..
> 
> **Grantaire** : [17122017_a.jpg]
> 
> **Grantaire** : how do you feel about adopting this pink monstrosity for christmas
> 
> **Enjolras** : don’t even think about it
> 
> **Grantaire** : please im fucking freezing and i think the cashier lady will literally kick me out into the street if i don’t buy anything in the next 15 mins
> 
> **Enjolras** : i don’t think she can legally do that
> 
> **Grantaire** : if she sues im calling u as my lawyer

“Ferre says there’s a queue at the printer longer than the ones at the Louvre in summer, so he’ll be a while,” Courfeyrac said, having succumbed to the peer pressure set by Enjolras alone and checking phone. “But at least they’re blasting the heaters, which is more than we have to say.”

“If you have a complaint, take care of it yourself,” Enjolras, whose sweater had more fabric in it than all of Courfeyrac’s rather flimsy attire, instructed.

“How can a man say he’s truly at home if he cannot walk barefoot and in ten-year-old T-shirts in his own kitchen?” Courfeyrac said, but grabbed the Combeferre’s sweater from the back of Enjolras’s chair anyway. “I’ll go turn on the heat, if _anyone_ doesn’t mind.”

“I don’t mind,” Jehan said, turning in their chair and resting their feet on top of the radiator, in preparation for the heat to come.

Enjolras took a moment to appreciate the sheer mobility it took them to do that, then turned back to his phone.

> **Enjolras** : courf just managed to order a cataclysmic amount of faux breakfast food
> 
> **Enjolras** : if you’re interested
> 
> **Grantaire** : why didn’t you say so BEFORE i bought this??
> 
> **Grantaire** : be there in 20

“If you’re not using them anymore, can I use that page with the statistics for blackout poetry?” Jehan asked.

Enjolras looked at them, then slowly pulled the page out of their arm’s reach, which in this case meant, on top of the pile he was already half-leaning over. He really ought to clean up the table before the poor delivery guy came, he thought, and battled with the thought for a while, as that would also mean an admission of defeat of sorts. Then he pulled all his papers in a very undignified stack and carried them back to his bedroom, not missing the way Jehan instantly spread out their writing utensils on the table, in his wake.

“Do you need any help?” he asked when he was back on the hallway, raising his voice so that Courfeyrac could hear him from where he was fixing the heat.

It took a moment, but then, “Naw, I’m alright,” Courfeyrac drawled, and, “check the radiator in Ferre’s room, if you please? I think I’ve got it.”

Enjolras did, and drew back his hand with a hiss. “It’s on.”

“Hell yeah!” Courfeyrac said. “Now let’s see if we’ve still got hot water…”

Which was about the right moment to retreat once more, from past experience, so Enjolras drifted back to the kitchen, where he found Jehan half-draped over the heater, crossing out words on a page they’d fixed on the windowsill. The dinner plates outside had shattered into thousands of smaller snowflakes now, which swirled viciously in the air, even at the level of their 8th floor window.

“What _are_ you doing, Jehan?” he asked, giving in to his curiosity at last.

“I’m debunking Freud. I intend to crash a PhD presentation,” Jehan said, hand not stilling even for one moment. Which sounded about right.

When fifteen minutes on the clock had passed, Enjolras put some more water to boil and set about making an unholy mix of mint and chamomile tea he’d learnt from Cosette, in case of colds.

“Alright, how’s this?” Courfeyrac returned to them victorious, only missing the laurel leaves in his hair to announce his feat, and spread out his hands.

Both Enjolras and Jehan turned to look at him, and noticed that he seemed to have exchanged Combeferre’s rather sensible sweater to one featuring dinosaurs wearing santa hats, at some point during the process of turning on the heat.

“Love it,” Jehan said, before going back to sprawling on the radiator.

“Did you put on two more layers right after you turned the heat to the max?” Enjolras asked, unseeingly seeping two tea bags in the same mug.

“I’m what the people call toasty,” Courfeyrac grinned. “Jehan, how’s the heat that I just invented?”

“It’s great,” Jehan said, “I’m never leaving your place again.”

“That’s the spirit,” Courfeyrac laughed, which was just when the doorbell rang. “My God, is that Filippo with the food?”

“I’ll get it,” Enjolras said, abandoning the tea bags to their own devices.

Even eight flights of stairs above street level, the smell of fresh snow was overpowering as he opened the door and stepped aside.

“Hello, what’s faux breakfast?” Grantaire asked the moment he took his first step inside.

Enjolras leant around him to close the door. “It’s an unholy mix of soaked pancakes and over-glazed doughnuts.”

“Sounds like heaven to me,” Grantaire said, stepping out of his boots and letting some snow rain down from his beanie and into the floor, not doing much difference for either.

Enjolras smiled. “You once said gingerbread was invented purely to seal children’s mouths shut on holidays.”

“What can I say, that’s what grandma did with me,” Grantaire said, taking off his coat and letting some more snow fall at and on their feet. “So, you know, I saw this crazy thing online last night, well, at 2 am, but you get me…”

“Is it the food? Do you need help? Aw, hi, R!” Courfeyrac waved from the kitchen door. “What brings you to our door?”

“Dude at the workshop sent an email fifteen minutes before class was to start, saying that he got stuck in traffic just outside of town and that he’s damned if he’s coming this week,” Grantaire said, unrolling his scarf and hanging it and his soaked coat by the door. “Teaches you why seeking a life of cleaner air and humanely-shaped houses in the countryside is in fact toxic for you.”

“And you thought you’d visit?”

“Enj invited me,” Grantaire said, pointing at Enjolras, who had been taking notes on the feeling of snow melting over his socks for the past minute, as a means of keeping himself from shaking the snow out of Grantaire’s hair.

Courfeyrac did a double take, and Enjolras took his chance and stepped past them both in his soggy socks. “ _When_?” Courfeyrac asked.

“Half an hour ago,” Enjolras said, and slipped back into the kitchen.

“You little scoundrel, you could’ve said something, I would’ve put on something better!” Courfeyrac called after him.

And, through some more scuffling, he heard Grantaire say, “Aw, Courf, you _do_ care.”

“Of course I do,” Courfeyrac said, leading him into the kitchen too, their only neutral meeting zone in an apartment made predominantly of bedrooms. “Jehan’s here too,” he added, at the last moment.

Grantaire smiled widely from the doorway, snow still melting in his hair. “Jehan!”

Jehan turned away from the windowsill and matched his grin size for size. “R! You’re wearing the gloves I gave you!”

“Not anymore!” Grantaire laughed, peeling them off. “One point for fashion, zero for my fingers. _Great_ at keeping coffee from burning your palms, though.”

“ _And_ my nail polish!”

It was a pale blue and purple iridescent shade, applied with a surprising amount of skill. “Also great at hiding hypothermia,” Grantaire said, flexing his fingers.

Enjolras ergonomically moved the mug from one side of the counter to the other, closer to where Grantaire was currently blowing on his reddened hands. Upon noticing it, he leaned in and looked inside.

Then he cooed, and looked at Enjolras. “You made me that gross tea I said I liked at Cosette’s.”

Enjolras raised an eyebrow. “You asked for seconds.”

“Yeah, no, I genuinely fucking love it, that was not the point,” Grantaire said, taking the mug in his hands and inhaling deeply. “ _Ah_. I fucking love everyone in this room right now.”

“And I’d love Filippo if he bothered to show up before we’re snowed in,” Courfeyrac said, glancing back at the entrance door. But then he draped an arm around Grantaire’s shoulders, “Love you too, ‘taire.”

“Love you too,” Jehan mumbled abstractedly.

When Grantaire lastly glanced his way, Enjolras greeted him with a raised eyebrow, which earned him a grin right back.

“Who’s Filippo?” Grantaire asked, in between two gulps of tea.

“Courfeyrac’s morning amour,” Jehan said, scribbling still. “He lives in a pancake house.”

“ _Hopefully_ ,” Courfeyrac said, pointedly.

“Intriguing, tell me more,” Grantaire said.

Enjolras leant back against the sink with the faulty faucet and let the conversation wash over him like a mild summer drizzle.

> **Enjolras** : if there’s any trouble, i can come with a pair of boots and a thicker coat.
> 
> **Combeferre** : I’m fairly certain it looks worse out the window rather than up-close. I can still see the pavement outside the library doors. Shouldn’t take much longer.
> 
> **Enjolras** : call if you need us

“Enjolras,” Courfeyrac said.

“What?” Enjolras looked up. “Ah.”

Courfeyrac was currently holding up the very pink monstrosity that Grantaire had deemed fit to show him before. It was, if the mind allowed that much stretching, roughly elephant-shaped, with different shades of pink on the ears and trunk. It was smaller in reality, but no less striking.

“Since you were so vehement about not wanting it,” Grantaire said, sidling up next to him, “I decided to give it to somebody who can actually appreciate the gesture. Her name’s Samantha.”

“Charming, isn’t she?” Courfeyrac grinned. “Bringing some colour and joy in an old man’s life.”

The two of them, both older than him, Enjolras by a couple of months, Grantaire by nearly three years, looked on, and eventually nodded. Then the doorbell rang one more time, and Courfeyrac’s grin split his face, and he rushed, elephant and all, to the front door, an action shortly followed by exclamations about toppings and recipes and the worst back-handed, pancake-themed pick-up lines Enjolras had ever heard in his life.

Grantaire leant a bit towards him. “Where’s Ferre?”

“Institute,” Enjolras said. “Photocopying tests, most likely.”

“Uh-huh,” Grantaire said, reaching around him to put the now-empty mug in the sink. “And you?”

“Mentally, I’m back in my room, buried under a pyramid of coursework,” Enjolras said, while the conversation went on by the front door. “Morally, I’m in purgatory.”

Grantaire grinned. “What about emotionally?”

Given the fact that he was still leaning precariously close to him, Enjolras would have said he was pendulating somewhere in between the second, fourth, and eight circles of hell (and how fitting, that he’d learnt those by heart solely from listening to Grantaire talk about Dante for 2 hours uninterrupted a year or so before, on a particularly empty night at the Musain). Yet, he didn’t say anything, just looked at Grantaire in a way that was sure to make him laugh, and felt only softly disappointed when it had the intended effect, and Grantaire turned away from him.

“I’ve dipped my toes in the upside-down lakes of Heaven,” Courfeyrac announced then, bouncing into the kitchen carrying four boxes of various sizes and colours, and somehow filling the entire mass of air with the smell of cinnamon in 0.01 seconds. “And let me tell you, they echoed back to me in the tones of icing sugar.”

“Food,” Jehan announced solemnly, as if all the poetic artistry in the room had changed muses.

“You weren’t kidding,” Grantaire told him, facing the pile of boxes on the kitchen table.

“Okay, kids, Filippo has done us good and earned a big tip and a mystery phone number for it, now let’s gather round and cherish his memory,” Courfeyrac said.

Then Enjolras watched as half their last stock of napkins and plastic cutlery was coordinately brought to the table and divided by rules Courfeyrac alone seemed to know, saying that the last thing they needed on this glorious morning was have dishes in the sink, which was fair, in Enjolras’s opinion, since the thing _was_ leaking, but he still thought what Combeferre would say about their carbon imprint when he came home.

“Here,” Grantaire offered him a waffle on a napkin, “to soothe your moral quandaries.” Then he leaned over the table and stole a small fondant heart from on top of a pink doughnut, and gingerly placed it in the centre of Enjolras’s soon-to-be meal.

Later, Enjolras had been aggressively goaded (by Courfeyrac and Jehan, with promises not to listen to any 70s pop _only_ if he complied) and gently pulled (by Grantaire, by hand, and with an embarrassingly small amount of protest from Enjolras) to Courfeyrac’s room, the second best thing to a living room that they had, even since Combeferre had decreed that they were all better off and more productive in their own spaces, and carried all his belongings in the one remaining room.

He was thinking that really, mentally, morally, emotionally and most of all physically, he ought to be in his room, revising all that didn’t want to be revised, changing whatever hadn’t been changed in his other drafts, and mostly making a very dreary affair of his day off, as was natural, at the beginning of December. Yet, Courfeyrac’s room was much more welcoming than his (with the strips of lights, the photos stuck to the walls near his bed, and with the bookshelves which would have looked uncharacteristically stuffed with all kinds of historical and political volumes, had one not known anything about Courfeyrac), and Jehan had started reciting from his anti-Freud limericks, which made both Courfeyrac and Grantaire double over, and, all in all, Enjolras found it hard to actually make himself leave.

When Combeferre arrived home, he found them on various pillows on the floor, with Jehan and Courfeyrac excitedly trying to reach the limit of Top-50 hits Grantaire could improvise on Courfeyrac’s quasi-abandoned antique-store guitar.

“Glad to see you’re not giving yourself nosebleeds over-studying anymore,” he told Enjolras, with a pointed look.

And, at Grantaire’s wide-eyed look, Enjolras said, “That was one time.”

“Twice, but fine,” Combeferre said, set his backpack by the door, and joined them on the floor. “Is that The Piña Colada Song?”

Grantaire laughed. “Hopefully not, else I’m getting sued.”

“So, yes,” Combeferre translated.

Jehan turned to Enjolras with a serious look and a pointed finger. “Not _technically_ a 70s hit.”

“Technically, it’s all it is,” Grantaire said, still gleefully plucking notes.

“We should do another video soon,” Courfeyrac said, appreciatively, then looping a be-sweatered arm around Combeferre’s shoulders. “Ferre could join in again.”

Amidst Jehan’s sounds of approval, Enjolras found space to frown in confusion. “ _You_ sang with them?”

Combeferre shrugged, smiling. “It was fun. They asked.”

“ _Everybody’s_ sung with us, Enj,” Courfeyrac said, admonishingly. “Well, everybody’s sung with R, I just happen to do it most often. You should hear his and Eponine’s duet!”

Grantaire silenced the guitar in order to wave his hands in the air. “No, no, that one was a mess. I didn’t even have a good mic at the time! _Don’t_ ,” he pointed at Enjolras, “listen to the early ones.”

“What makes you think I haven’t?” Enjolras grinned, because he had. “I must have missed the one with Ferre, but I’m pretty up to date.”

“I liked the one with Marius,” Combeferre said, over Grantaire’s horrified groan.

Courfeyrac laughed. “Yes, poor dear, he was trying so hard.”

“I think it was very earnest,” Jehan said. “I saw Cosette cry while listening to it.”

“The only ones he’s spared are you, and Bossuet, who loudly claimed to have no musical education, not even an urban one, and then gave us reasons to believe him,” Courfeyrac explained, winning a few winces from everyone at the end. “Even Gavroche had a go.”

Grantaire physically shuddered, but mostly for show, judging by his smile. “I’m never touching Linkin Park again.”

Enjolras smiled too, feigning calm in the hopes of passing the subject without any more information being spilled. Which would have been happened, if only Combeferre didn’t catch his eye with a very hiddenly mischievous look around that time. Enjolras’s immediate glare was all for naught.

“Oh, but Enjolras’s got quite a musical education,” Combeferre said, traitorously satisfied.

And Enjolras glared sharper daggers at him, but the dice had been cast already. The gasps were thrown around the room.

“That’s _right!_ ” Courfeyrac exclaimed.

“I forgot!” Jehan did too, seconds apart.

“Wait, _wait_ , what? You do?” Grantaire turned to him fully, guitar forgotten in his lap. “How? _You_?”

“I attended a music-oriented middle school,” Enjolras admitted, between his teeth, and scowled some more at Combeferre. “I was eleven, it didn’t stick, that’s the end of it.”

“ _What_ ,” Grantaire said. Then he set the guitar by his side. “No, I must know. Sing something, anything you want, sing me happy birthday.”

“It’s nobody’s birthday,” Enjolras pointed out.

“Technically, it’s bound to be. Sing for the miscellaneous strangers having their birthday today,” Jehan said.

At which point Enjolras sighed, and let himself fall backwards on the floor, covered his face with one of Courfeyrac’s pillows, and kept it there until they all stopped badgering him, and went on to the next interesting subject, which was something dealing with the price of pennies.

The snow didn’t stop, but it did reach a more constant rhythm, and by the time late afternoon reached them, the pavement that Combeferre had so claimed to still see turned completely white, apart from the few cars still trying to push through it. Enjolras had left Grantaire to presumably scavenge for clues of _a yet artistic mind_ in his room while he and Courfeyrac went downstairs to see Jehan off, which ended with him climbing back up alone, as Courfeyrac found his valiant heart once more and said he’d see them home.

Yet, when he returned, and slowly, cautiously opened the door to his room, he didn’t know what he’d been expecting to find, but it was surely not Grantaire leafing through his essays with the look of someone actually reading what was on them, legs crossed on top of his bed and the sleeves of his sweater, for once, pushed up to the elbows, so that the green and purple and black of his tattoos stood out starkly in the dim light.

“Courf has done the impossible,” Grantaire said. “Made it hot enough that even I can feel it.”

It was rather warm, that was true. “I half thought you’d gone to sleep,” Enjolras said.

Grantaire looked up at him and grinned. “So did I, honestly, about half a page into your coursework. Your essays are much more entertaining, by far. It’s like revolutionary pamphlets, but with MLA sources. By the way, you might want to look through those there on the right, if you have yet to turn them in. I think I doodled a bit on the sides, there’s certainly Jean-Jacques Rousseau in a funny hat.”

“Serves him right.”

Grantaire gasped softly. “You’ve changed. I thought you were a fan.”

Enjolras closed the door behind him and walked over to the bed and sat down too. Then made himself more comfortable. Then had to stop himself from getting any _more_ comfortable, which was an issue, lately.

“ _Il secondo pensiero è il migliore_ ,” he said.

“Tell me about it,” Grantaire smiled, then discarded the paper in his hand and picked up his phone. “Okay, so, you didn’t have any music on your laptop, so I say we’ll systematically go through everything I have listened to in the past year and see what we have in common.”

“You really think that would work?” he asked, skeptically.

Grantaire glanced up at him. “You underestimate the volume of music I consume on a daily basis. Okay, so, let’s see,” he said, and scooted closer to Enjolras, holding his phone up between them.

The list seemed to go on endlessly, with barely any breaks for albums Grantaire had apparently listened to on repeat, seemingly in no sort of order or category, and sincerely, Enjolras thought it futile to even try. Yet, after several minutes, his eyebrows rose into his hairline and he pointed, to stop the continuous scrolling.

“That one,” he said.

“ _That one_?” Grantaire asked, then looked from his phone to Enjolras. “The Decemberists? How on earth did we both settle for that one?”

Enjolras shrugged. “It was late at night, I got lost on YouTube.”

“Incredible,” Grantaire said, then opened the album. “Okay, which one?”

“That one,” Enjolras pointed again.

“Well, okay, that makes slightly more sense, at least it’s not an obscure one.” Then Grantaire looked at him with a bright smile. “Want to sing _The Crane Wife_ with me?”

“Definitely not,” Enjolras said, instantly, but faltered when he saw the hurt expression on Grantaire’s face. “I’m really, really not good at improv, and I can barely sing, let alone _that._ ”

“Oh, fine,” Grantaire sighed, then looked back down at his phone. “Shall we keep looking, then? I’m making a playlist right now, _Songs that Enj knows,_ just for future reference and possible blackmail, who knows?

“Hilarious,” Enjolras said, drily, but leant back in. “Go on.”

A very unguessable amount of time later, they were lying on their back in his bed, legs dangling over the side, and listening to a compilation of old French songs Enjolras recognised from his childhood. It was the calmest he’d been in days. It was utterly unexpected, and surreal, and all he felt was content.

“How on earth did we manage to fight _so much_ all the time?” he had to ask.

For a while, Grantaire was silent, but eventually he did say, conversationally, “Do you really want an answer, or are you just wondering out loud?” Then he paused and let out a sigh. “Because I've given it quite some thought.”

Amidst all that content, a screw started turning in Enjolras’s insides. Maybe, like he’d always thought, a relaxed life was simply not for him. “So have I.”

Grantaire took in a long breath, then hummed, as if in thought. “Yeah, so, it was either more complicated or not as complicated as this, which basically covers all our options, but basically, in between my depression, which was worse than it had been before or since…”

“And my abandonment issues,” Enjolras took his chance to add, and smiled when Grantaire turned his head and gave him a funny look. “Combeferre’s theory. He’s right, I think. I was terrified of the idea of the group not working, for any reason.”

“Right,” Grantaire said, not unkindly. “So, in between that, and the the whole political climate, which was just shit at the time, as it always is, I guess we were bound to lash out at something, and, well, there you were, there I was, you see how it was…”

They’d talked about it, years before, when they’d both decided to give decency a try, a couple years too late, but still, but Enjolras didn’t remember them really talking about it. It had been more a short list of apologies followed by another short list of things they’d understood. This felt lighter and heavier, in a way.

“What a pair we make,” he breathed out with what almost felt like amusement.

“Yeah,” Grantaire said, a smile in his voice too. “No way they’ll grant us a visa for Panama now.”

And that was just unexpected enough that Enjolras had to laugh aloud.

“Also…” Grantaire started when he’d quietened, but trailed off soon after. Enjolras turned his head to look at him. “See, I might be digging my own grave right now.”

“What?” Enjolras asked. “Why?”

Grantaire sighed, and grandly gesticulated in the air. “I am, as the poets say, driving myself into a corner.”

And, before Enjolras got the chance to guess at his meaning or ask anything more, he felt the mattress rise beside him, and saw Grantaire on his feet now, and slightly fretting his hands. So he sat up too, although staying on the edge of the bed.

“Okay, so, don’t take this the wrong way,” Grantaire started, looking slightly pained. “Don’t take it _any_ way, really.”

“Alright,” Enjolras said, looking at him.

Not like Grantaire seemed to hear him right then. “Right. So. Here we go. Okay, first, this is just for my state of mind, which is probably a bad choice of words, since I can’t imagine it will do me any good, but I guess even now I’m masochistic enough that I have to do it --”

“You really have no filter,” Enjolras said, in a monotone, just to see if it would make him break out of the anxious circle he was literally pacing himself into.

“No, I don’t, do you?” Grantaire said without missing a beat, and Enjolras laughed, but then quieted when he saw Grantaire looking at him in a way that seemed at once wary and resigned, and maybe a little bit amused. And it took a moment longer before he finally said, “Did you know I had a crush on you two years ago?”

Enjolras stared at him. Then, when he at last tried to open his mouth, instead of a neutral and expected _what_ , what got out was, “Wasn’t that _right_ when we were arguing all the time?”

Grantaire pointed at him as if he’d just won the lotto. “ _Now_ you’re getting it. Yeah, it wasn’t even funny, it was _bad_.” He shook his head and pulled out his phone with slightly frantic movements, and Enjolras saw that his hands were shaking. “Anyway, do you wanna play _The Decemberists_ now?”

And now, there was finally that, “What?”

“Trust me, I _really_ didn’t intend to say all this when I woke up this morning, which, case in point, filter, so let’s just -- put it on the back burner for now. Please?” He shook his head again. “Are you sure you haven’t listened to Gregory Isakov before?”

“Grantaire,” Enjolras said. His throat was suddenly very, very dry.

“What?” Grantaire looked up from his phone.

Enjolras grimaced in apology, and hoped it would not be taken as anything else. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

Grantaire laughed, although it was more a sacadated breath than anything, and he pushed a hand through his hair, looking away. “Yeah, well, who knew? I mean, Courf knew, _somehow_ , so maybe Ferre too, Eponine, couldn’t really hide it from her, maybe Feuilly, because he sees everything ever since he vanquished sleep, but most of these are just guesses. Oh, and there was Marius.”

“ _Marius_?” Enjolras gaped.

“I needed someone I was in no way close to! He made for a very decent confidant!” Grantaire exclaimed, shoulders hunched at Enjolras’s tone.

This begged for a few moments just ro reel. “I can’t believe _Marius_ knew how to keep a secret,” Enjolras muttered afterwards.

“To be fair, he used to be scared shitless of you, which was also a factor,” Grantaire said, and when Enjolras looked at him, he smiled. “Joking.”

It was nice of him to pretend, at least, like they both hadn’t been there when Marius used to look like a deer in the headlights whenever there was so much as a hint that he would be left alone in a room with Enjolras. Enjolras shook his head. He was getting derailed.

“Sorry for snapping at you so much.”

The same sad smile he’d seen on Grantaire many times before, but not so much lately, made an appearance now. “Sorry for solely referring to you in my head and behind your back as spoiled brat all throughout the first year we met.” And, when Enjolras raised an eyebrow, “And for drawing moustaches and tutus on half those posters I myself had made, that one time three years ago.”

Despite everything, Enjolras shook with laughter. When he glanced back up, he saw Grantaire with the same expression on his face, hands still fretting a bit, as if with a mind of their own, and some heart returned to his body, at last.

Yet, they stood there in silence for quite a while longer.

“So…” Enjolras said, when the stalling became heavy.

“So?” Grantaire gazed at him, looking as if he was waiting for any of two shoes to drop. “Enjolras, I just spent all my courage reserves for the year telling you that, if you want anything else from me, you _have_ to ask.”

Which was also fair. Yet, when Enjolras thought of something to say, some way to start, his mind came up empty, and he had to close his mouth again. He wasn’t used to not knowing how to ask for something, but he was aware that this came from not asking for a very diverse array of things in general. Combeferre had once told him something similar, _I think you’d have a harder time asking for things for yourself_. It was at once predictable and agonizing that he’d be right in this too.

So, helplessly, and feeling just a bit like he was willingly stepping off the edge of a precipice,  Enjolras held out his hand, palm upwards, and smiled. It only took a small eternity for Grantaire to move his own as well, and eventually grasp it, as lightly as he could.

Since eye contact was downright painful right then, Enjolras took the chance to gaze at the tattoos that started on his wrist and disappeared into the bunched sleeves of his sweater. “They are pretty,” he said, as if they’d been talking about that all along. “Although I can see how the addition of some moving ants and crawlers might embellish them.”

Grantaire chuckled and pressed his hand a bit more firmly. “I know, right?” he said, and when Enjolras tried looking up, he bent down and kissed him.

Hands on his face, edging into his hair. After a moment for his brain to make new synapses to fit the situation, Enjolras reached blindly for something to hold on to, and his hands grasped at Grantaire’s elbows, the sweater bunched there, and he barely hesitated before pulling him closer, so that he could kiss him back properly.

There was an amused burst of breath against his lips at that, but it only served to make Enjolras hold on more firmly, revelling in the way Grantaire’s fingers were treading through his hair now, in the way he seemed to hold Enjolras close too, the warmth he was giving off, now that his hands were no longer frozen, and not very aware of much else. He might have been gripping him too tightly, but he only let go when Grantaire pulled back a bit, stared at him for a moment, and then unceremoniously let himself fall right beside him on the edge of the bed.

A few moments of silent reflection was all Enjolras could manage before he felt compelled to ask, “What was that about courage?”

This time, Grantaire’s laugh was more incredulous than strained. “Another secret of the trade, never let on how much you still have in your stores,” he said, but shook his head soon after. “That’s bullshit. That one surprised me too.”

Enjolras smiled at him, or hoped he did, since his whole face felt like foreign territory now. “You don’t say?”

Grantaire turned to smile at him too, a little shyly, more than a little incredulous still. And Enjolras felt himself beaming now, so he lay a hand in between them and leaned in, just slightly at first, just to see Grantaire draw in a shaky breath, just to watch the way his eyes quickly flitted over his face, before Enjolras cupped his face in his hands this time, and kissed him again. He’d been adrift before, but now he felt his fingers go numb and his mind fuzzy, when Grantaire tilted his head and kissed him back, tentative for only a moment before softly opening his mouth, hands trailing up Enjolras’s back.

He would have pressed him right down into his pillows, had sense not won out in the end, making him reach out a hand to keep them upright. Maybe the others were right, and Enjolras had had his instincts and his reason switched in early infancy, because that had been nearly involuntary.

Grantaire looked searchingly into his face when they pulled back once more. Enjolras braced for some sort of heartbreaking clarification, but what came was, “You _sure_ you don’t want to sing for my obviously career-launching channel?”

And Enjolras stared at him for a moment, then burst into laughter, and, because he was a bit numb and giddy still, he leant his forehead against Grantaire’s shoulder. Grantaire shifted a bit and patted his back then, like Enjolras was mourning rather than experiencing the wildest happiness rushes he’d ever got in the confines of his own room. Then, after what must have been a generous amount of consideration, he proceeded to wrap his arms around Enjolras too, which was strange only in how normal it felt, given the fact that he didn’t remember them ever hugging before.

“I’m pretty sure we can pull off _one song_ ,” Grantaire was saying, cheek against his hair. “I take a stanza, you take a stanza, we both play the chorus. Have you ever used a sampler?”

“You really _don’t_ stop talking,” Enjolras muttered into his shoulder, not without a healthy dose of fondness.

“I’m a stress-talker,” Grantaire said. “Cheaper than stress-eating, not that I’m not prone to that too, but this has had the secondary effect of making me incorrigible the very moment I get even slightly nervous.”

“Are you?”

“Of course I’m damn nervous, Enjolras,” Grantaire said, but hugged him tighter all the same. Or, maybe, because of it.

Enjolras hadn’t known himself to be a very tactile person, although he’d hardly been interested enough to find out, yet now he felt like he didn’t want to pull away for the next decade, or at least until the snows passed. Yet, when they did, they each had their own brand of pained, if somewhat happy expressions on their face.

And, carefully, like trying out a new skill he’d found, Enjolras raised a hand and pushed Grantaire’s hair out of his eyes.

“We won’t hear the end of it when Courf finds out,” Grantaire whispered, as if not wanting to spook him in the act.

Enjolras smiled. “Let him be, he’s paying for our elopement, remember?”

“How could I forget?” Grantaire said, looking like he had. “It’s way out of our collective price range, though,” he blurted out a moment later. And, at Enjolras’s look, “I _did_ look, don’t laugh at me. You’re sure you don’t want to start small, say, something close, Livorno or Pisa, or maybe even San Marino, since I doubt you’ve gone yet since we last talked about it?”

Enjolras stared at the ceiling in the appearance of thinking about it, before grinning. “I’m not opposed to it.” Then, suddenly remembering, and before he had time to filter it, “You said two years ago?”

Grantaire leaned back with a pained groan and an even more melodramatic eyeroll, which probably was a good device to avoid Enjolras’s eyes now. “Yeah, pretty much,” he said, running a hand through his hair and seeming very interested in Enjolras’s pale olive ceiling. “...and then, recently.”

Some additional thought seemed to take spark right then, because his eyes widened and suddenly he started waving his hands at Enjolras.

“Just so you don't think I was mooning over you while you were failing to pronounce Gerrit van Honthorst,” he explained, grinning when Enjolras rolled his eyes in turn. “At first I thought we were just miraculously friendly, right? But then you kept talking to me, which was nice, and _fun_ , and don’t try to tell me you didn’t flirt with me, because we both know we both did, stop smiling, and also, yeah, by the way, I don’t know who you stole your sudden sense of humour from, but I’m willing to help you hide the body, if it means you get to keep it, so, yeah…”

“It was Charlemagne,” Enjolras faux-whispered, although unable to keep the grin off his face.

“Should have known, you’d never miss a chance to assassinate royalty,” Grantaire said, regaining his breath. “Wait, the king or the rapper?”

Enjolras raised one shoulder. “Who’s to say?”

Grantaire laughed. “Exactly what I was saying.”

Enjolras kind of wanted to kiss him again, with an urgency that felt foreign to him in every possible way. It was like his body was a pendulum slowly pulled closer and slower by a magnet. “I like you,” he thus found himself saying instead, filter still lost to the wind.

Grantaire looked at him with a bemused, if not displeased, expression. “Thanks,” he said. Then, when Enjolras squinted at him, he beamed. “Bonus points for concision. Can you say it again?”

Enjolras frowned. “I like you?”

“Yep.  That’s it,” Grantaire nodded. “I’m gonna need to record it for the sampler you’re going to use in my next video, so you know what to practice.”

“I didn’t realise this was a lo-fi collaboration.”

“Are you kidding me? That’s what this is all about, haven’t you ever wanted to live a day like in an indie movie? Of course you have, I know what music you listen to now,” Grantaire grinned. “By the way, I’m never going to let you live down the fact that you knew that term.”

“It’s not like it’s _Klangfarbenmelodie_ ,” Enjolras huffed.

Grantaire smiled, “Show-off.”

Then he pulled Enjolras in and kissed him again. Which was a bit surreal, still. This wasn’t what he’d expected to happen when he’d got out of bed that morning either. He would have probably brushed his hair, if he had. That was, he thought, what would have been expected of him, although he wasn’t sure. Not that it would have made any difference, anyway, by the time Grantaire was done with him. Enjolras hadn’t thought that dizziness could feel good before.

“I like you too, you closeted music nerd,” Grantaire grinned when he pulled back. “Not like I haven’t already said that like fifteen billion different times this afternoon, with various degrees of mortification.”

Enjolras considered giving him a witty retort for all of half a second, before deciding that he’d rather kiss him a little longer instead. Grantaire seemed to sense that, for, just before Enjolras leaned into him once more, he squeezed a hand in between them and softly pressed against Enjolras’s chest.

“Wait, wait, before all that, I have to ask,” Grantaire said. His grin was dazzling. “Will you come to _Belle Arti_ with me tomorrow?”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Songs that Enj knows and would definitely sing on camera: [one](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3cp8LERM70), [two](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E5H8DwJI0uA).  
> Songs that together manage to completely encompass Grantaire's character: [one](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EUrUfJW1JGk), [two](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FG1NrQYXjLU).  
> Thanks for coming to my Ted Talk.


End file.
